Riots in Paris
Nov 2 2005
#2
riots for 6 days and counting.
Has anyone seen any anarchist reactions to this?
Nov 2 2005
#3
JDMF wrote:
riots for 6 days and counting.Has anyone seen any anarchist reactions to this?
There's probably a poster called Jacques on the French version of libcom, whose reaction was something along the lines of
Jacques wrote:
Les cocks de la style de vie
Nov 2 2005
#4
I don't get why they attacked the firefighters?
Nov 2 2005
#5
wheresmyshoes wrote:
I don't get why they attacked the firefighters?
A leading womble once told me it was great that German autonomen attacked firemen cos like fireme wear a uniform, and like are part of the state man.
So maybe that's why? Or maybe it was a media lie (quite likely I reckon...).
Nov 2 2005
#6
or it could just be thatbeing some of the most marginalised people in france they are likely to strike at anything they perceive to be part of the state, kids attack firefighters on estates all the time in the UK. In Northern Ireland firefighters are often percieved crassly as prods, whilst ambulance drivers often get attacked for being fenians, of course it's completely irrational but it's a logical extension of exclusion, alienation and utter boredom.
Nov 2 2005
#7
revol68 wrote:
or it could just be thatbeing some of the most marginalised people in france they are likely to strike at anything they perceive to be part of the state, kids attack firefighters on estates all the time in the UK. In Northern Ireland firefighters are often percieved crassly as prods, whilst ambulance drivers often get attacked for being fenians, of course it's completely irrational but it's a logical extension of exclusion, alienation and utter boredom.
Yeah man it's nothing compared to the everyday violence of capital!
Nov 2 2005
#8
nah something needs to be done about it, just hard to see such things comng about when things are so atomised.
it's becoming quite a problem for capital too and thats why your getting the government pimping volunteer stuff, pseduo participatory bodies, community empowerment, and various ethnic/national identities.
Nov 2 2005
#9
Six days, though. Six sodding days. You don't fight the CRSS for six days over nothing. Any good French lefty analyses of this?
Nov 2 2005
#10
wasn't saying the rioting was over nothing was talkin specifically about the attcks on fire fighters.
Nov 2 2005
#11
Is this part of the wider issue of immigrants being forced to live in unfit accomodation?
Nov 2 2005
#12
6 days is a bloody long time, cause of those teenagers getting eletrocuted? A just cause though I gotta say.
Nov 3 2005
#13
Having lived in a Paris suburb for 11 years, I am not at all surprised at what is happening. Suburbia is a shit hole, unemployment is often 2 to 3 times as high as national levels, and more so amongst young people. Also, they have been constently ignored by successive governments and not allowed a real voice in any political party. The socialists are just as bad as the UMP. On top of there not being jobs, the country generates an image of these young people as not being totally part of France, being culturally different, being a "visible minority" (whatever the fuck that means).
Politically, socially, psychologically, they are excluded and oppressed. No wonder they have such urges for destruction.
Nov 4 2005
#14
well, it seems the riots have spread around the country. And apparently the two youths whose deaths sparked these riots were not being chased by police - according to some official report I heard about on Radio4 last night, although I bet the sources they used were as dodgy as fuck.
Does anyone know what the French anarchists reactions are to this? Does anyone subscribe to Le Monde Libertaire? The Federation Anarchiste website doesn't seem to say anything about it (although I don't speak French so I couldn't properly work out).
Nov 4 2005
#15
cnt vignolles dont seem to have anything either...
Nov 4 2005
#16
I read some stuff when this started about the kids getting killed not being the begining, and a few weeks before the govt. had started a campaign to "clean up the banlieu" (i dont think u should interchange this with english words) and had been deploying CRS in these areas - so whatever happened could be a reaction to this more widely. Tho i dont know how accurate that is.
Heres some links:
IMC Paris - http://paris.indymedia.org
L'Humanite - http://www.humanite.fr/journal/2005-11-03/2005-11-03-817234
Maoists - http://paris.indymedia.org/article.php3?id_article=45370
Anti-Riot demo - http://paris.indymedia.org/article.php3?id_article=45385
PCF - http://paris.indymedia.org/article.php3?id_article=45378
This site is where i found most of those links - http://barbarie.org/
Liberation - http://www.liberation.fr
Time line, check out lemonde for more - http://www.lemonde.fr..-704172,0.html
Cant find any specificly 'narcho stuff... we used to get emails from someone aout French anarchist stuff (didnt we john?) maybe we could ask her....
Nov 4 2005
#17
Quote:
I don't get why they attacked the firefighters?
If people are lighting fire to fight the police and firefighters come to put them out people get angry and attack them as weel.
Nov 4 2005
#18
Translated into english:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/11/327207.html
Which is originally from this blog:
Nov 6 2005
#19
rkn wrote:
Translated into english:http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/11/327207.html
Which is originally from this blog:
Which itself is a translation from a press release by the French Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Communist Party. Bloody Stalminists again...
Nov 6 2005
#20
I was quite pleased when i heard that the disturbances had spread to other plarts of france, including Lille where i can vouch that the authorities are complete cunts. I was there about a week ago and got searched by four armed police for no apparent reason, they said they were searching for drugs and when i told them that i didnt have any they decided to go through my rucksack in the middle of lille station, removed every bit of clothing, loooked through all my camera films, went through my wallet, opened up a couple of pressies that i was bringing back home for the elders, etc etc. They were smug bastards too, you should have seen their faces light up when they found some rizla papers and a sheesha pipe! Of course this is fairly trivial compared to what some people are subjected to every other day and i did have the priveleged position of being a british tourist but i really hope some disillusioned french youth has landed one of those smug filth with a molotov or at least a bottle of piss or something!
Nov 6 2005
#21
A couple of things. News has just come on the radio about the spread of the riots and most of what I've heard/read from the bourgeious press is along the lines of "disaffected alienated muslim youth". The latest spin from the Beeb was that a lot of it was directed at would-be President and current interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy, a man who intends to be to France as Thatcher was to Britain. He basically characterised the banlieu youth as scum and said they should be hosed down. While I'm sure it plays well in the French equivalent of Tunbridge Wells it's a wee bit insensitive. Even by the standards of a politician.
Should this thread be split, BTW, as there seems to be a bit about the riots in France and another bit about what consitutes a suburb and their class nature? FWIW I think Britain, at least in the SE, is moving much more towards the French model. The Thames Gateway project promoted by Prescott for flood-friendly homes for people unlikely to earn enough to live in London is a prime example of this.
I'll write about SE London because it's what I know, but the same is true in any direction. Most working class outer London suburbs don't have a significant high rise element to their buildings, of those that do Thamesmead is probably the best known. More common are large estates built between the wars for slum clearance, like Downham just north of Bromley, or Bellingham just south of Catford. While some people live there in houses with gardens, and different parts of it have a different make-up, areas like these are characterised by poor transport, shops and leisure activities. There certainly won't be any social centres or anarchist organising going on because people will move out when they have the chance. Living in deptford or Hackney might seem tough, but imagine having to travel further, at a greater cost, just to achieve things like meeting up for a beer. I suspect Blackbird Leys in Oxford is the same, and can see why this critique, which is at the hub of the IWCA's approach, would find ears there.
Generally, I would say the trend of the 60s with suburbs, that they got wealthier the further out you went, no longer holds.
Nov 6 2005
#22
really hard to find decent information about what's going on. It's all woolly generalisations.
Found this (sort of) interview in the (spits) Observer:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1635468,00.html
and this in NZ herald:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10353914
Nov 7 2005
#23
Wikipedia might make intersting reading:
Nov 7 2005
#24
That Wikipedia link is the most definitive yet.
Nov 7 2005
#25
A comrade from the French CNT/AIT sent the following
Below, the leaflet we issed in both french and arabic in paris.
http://cnt-ait.info/article.php3?id_article=1138&recalcul=oui
If you want to have a description of the life in the popular suburb in
France (before the up rising) let have a look at this text :
http://cnt-ait.info/article.php3?id_article=1093&recalcul=oui It has been
written in may 2005, and it describes the life in a popular suburb, and the
dirty game of the police that has lead to the actual situation. If you may
translate it in english it would be great.
Nov 7 2005
#26
What a fool.
Who was that dude who called all the rioters scum?
Nov 7 2005
#27
Are the riots in Paris today for the same reason as happened in the UK in 1981?
A number of the students I work with want to go to Paris “To show solidarity with their disenfranchised brothers and sisters” I am told, is anyone here getting a coach together or anything like that?
Nov 7 2005
#28
I'm a tad confused because I thought it was over those boys dying but now apparently it's not? 
Nov 7 2005
#29
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4413250.stm
The French Govt. seems to be doing fuck all to try and calm stuff down....
Nov 7 2005
#30
wheresmyshoes wrote:
I'm a tad confused because I thought it was over those boys dying but now apparently it's not?
Riotes and insurrections are usually sparked off my some event, but are actually about years of resentment. So the reasons they're still rioting must go well beyond whether the cops killed two boys, and so the deaths themselves are probably a bit irrelevant.
Edit: according to the Wikipedia, the kids ran away because they wanted to avoid the hours of questioning, etc. that the cops can do without any charge. Which seems a reasonable thing to run away from; doesn't matter whether they were being chased.
I would just like to point out that this news article calls the place where the rioting happened a 'suburb', which i think proves me right in some argument about paris we had ages ago or something...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4389920.stm