Colby Cosh On The Paris Riots
Nov 08, 05 | 2:27 am by John LopezColby Cosh on the Paris riots:
That is why the conflagration in Paris is so troubling, if one weren’t troubled solely for the sake of Paris herself. But it is easy to be too horrified here. Even by the worst accounts, France’s Islamic rioters are less well-armed and inflicting less destruction than American blacks did in U.S. cities in the late 1960s–riots which themselves overlay the memory of much worse public disorder. (Score one for Euro gun culture: the French rioters haven’t yet been able to do any worse to the police than to ambush them and plink away at them with pellet guns.) The parallel here seems obvious, and if it has any relevance, we are not presented with a simple matter of social unrest proceeding from a failure to integrate new immigrants, or from the presence of a foreign and violent faith. It’s a question of warehousing members of a particular ethnic group in horrible, unsightly, cheaply-made housing projects.
November 8th, 2005 at Nov 08, 05 | 6:04 pm
I got a different sense from reading the whole piece than I got from this excerpt.
The wording of the highlighted text seems unfortunate. Thes people aren’t being warehoused because nobody’s holding a gun to their head as far as I can tell. These housing projects seem more like attractive nuisances than warehouses.
Another Tragedy of the Commons.