Cities of Darkness

Theordore Dalrymple wrote an essay for City Journal that is a damning indictment of the French multiculturalist nanny state. Vast state-subsidized concrete ghettos ring most French cities, peopled by immigrants and their descendents from North and West Africa. To say that a counter-culture has evolved in these cités would be an understatement. The most extreme of the extremists are incubating in socialist ant farms like those in France.

Here’s a few snippets taken from Mr. Dalrymple’s essay, The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris:

Reported crime in France has risen from 600,000 annually in 1959 to 4 million today, while the population has grown by less than 20 percent... Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with their French-born descendants...

...A Habitation de Loyer Modéré -- a House at Moderate Rent, or HLM -- [is] for the workers, largely immigrant, whom the factories needed during France’s great industrial expansion from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the unemployment rate was 2 percent and cheap labor was much in demand. By the late eighties, however, the demand had evaporated, but the people whose labor had satisfied it had not; and together with their descendants and a constant influx of new hopefuls, they made the provision of cheap housing more necessary than ever.

A kind of anti-society has grown up in [the HLMs] -- a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust -- greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years -- is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them.

Benevolence inflames the anger of the young men of the cités as much as repression, because their rage is inseparable from their being. Ambulance men who take away a young man injured in an incident routinely find themselves surrounded by the man’s “friends,” and jostled, jeered at, and threatened: behavior that, according to one doctor I met, continues right into the hospital, even as the friends demand that their associate should be treated at once, before others.

But [state entitlements are] not a cause of gratitude -- on the contrary: they feel it as an insult or a wound, even as they take it for granted as their due. But like all human beings, they want the respect and approval of others, even -- or rather especially -- of the people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity... The state, while concerning itself with the details of their housing, their education, their medical care, and the payment of subsidies for them to do nothing, abrogates its responsibility completely in the one area in which the state’s responsibility is absolutely inalienable: law and order.

No one should underestimate the danger that this failure poses, not only for France but also for the world. The inhabitants of the cités are exceptionally well armed. When the professional robbers among them raid a bank or an armored car delivering cash, they do so with bazookas and rocket launchers, and dress in paramilitary uniforms. From time to time, the police discover whole arsenals of Kalashnikovs in the cités. There is a vigorous informal trade between France and post-communist Eastern Europe: workshops in underground garages in the cités change the serial numbers of stolen luxury cars prior to export to the East, in exchange for sophisticated weaponry.

Some questions:

* If multicultural socialism is largely responsible for the rise of disaffected Arab and African immigrants---resentment for being given their rights and privileges rather than earning them---could the same phenomenon occur in Iraq or Afghanistan?

* What would be a cogent response of the US if a devastating terrorist attack was planned and mounted from a French HLM? Or its British or German equivalent?

* Would it be possible to undo the destructive cultures that have evolved in these ghettos?