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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35215 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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I think the idea the “French people will move on” is wrong. This is a blow to the morale of the French people. They have received a serious injury to their identity. Living among people who can destroy your car and shop whenever they want is demoralizing and in some invisible way probably leads to an 80k monetary injury per every affected Parisian resident. It decreases sum total happiness and induces a feeling of helplessness. So it’s really serious. It’s not the same as if it were 10000 unrelated instances of minor theft.

The first riots in the banlieues were in 1981. In subsequent decades these regions were ethnically cleansed of their native and Jewish populations, as was widely documented in major movies, on TV and in the papers. Nothing about this is new. There have been some major stories. The French did nothing for 40 years, they're not going to start now.

as was widely documented in major movies

As of 2022, the movies were sending a slightly different message:

Abdel, an Algerian-French soldier, holds a press conference outside a police station after his 13-year-old brother Idir dies in hospital, the result of three apparent policemen beating and leaving him for dead. He appeals for calm, but a group of youth, led by Abdel’s brother Karim, disrupt the press conference by tossing a Molotov cocktail and raiding the police station. After stealing a weapons locker and a police van, the youth head back to their banlieue, Athena, where Abdel also grew up. They begin to barricade themselves - and the residents of Athena - inside the housing complex.

CRS riot police are sent to put down the uprising, while the youth respond by shooting fireworks and other improvised missiles at the police. In the middle of the chaos, a drug dealer named Moktar tries to move bags of contraband out of Athena. With the youth refusing to let him leave, Moktar and his gang take shelter in Athena’s shisha lounge, where they dig a hole to stash the contraband until the uprising has passed.

Abdel returns to Athena to attend a memorial service for Idir. He sees Karim and tries to speak to him, but the latter escapes where the memorial service is disrupted by the ongoing violence outside. Abdel then helps to organize an evacuation and shelter for Athena’s residents, including a former terrorist named Sebastien, whom Abdel shelters in Athena’s daycare center. While leading a group of residents past a group of riot police, an altercation begins, and Abdel and other residents of Athena are kettled and arrested.

On and on the tearjerker goes, until – rather endearingly– the whole thing is pinned on the truly agentic evil, The Chuds:

In the final scene of the movie, a man in a van is shown recording the beating of Idir, which is later posted on social media. The “policemen” are revealed to be far-right instigators in disguise; they enter the van, drive into the woods, and burn the uniforms they had worn, revealing that the beating was a deliberate attempt to incite racial unrest.

Looking into the director's background, I was surprised to find something rare in such cases in the US:

Costa-Gavras was born in Loutra Iraias, Arcadia. His family spent the Second World War in a village in the Peloponnese, and moved to Athens after the war. His father had been a member of the Pro-Soviet branch of the Greek Resistance, and was imprisoned during the Greek Civil War. His father's Communist Party membership made it impossible for Costa-Gavras to attend university in Greece or to be granted a visa to the United States, so after high school he settled in France, where he began studying literature at the Sorbonne in 1951.[1]

I was surprised to find something rare in such cases in the US

Greeks are quite overrepresented in Hollywood actually, given the tiny number of Greek-Americans.

On and on the tearjerker goes, until – rather endearingly– the whole thing is pinned on the truly agentic evil, The Chuds:

I'm not claiming the French movie industry of all things is secretly conservative, only that the French public are well aware of the issues with violence and crime in the banlieues.

I actually like French movies, both on the merits and due to appreciating this now-quixotic «existence of sovereign, living non-Anglo civilizations» idea. It's very much a shame that, as Zack M. Davis says about him somehow genuinely being a woman, is a scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.

Anyway, I wonder if the public – most of all the disproportionately aged, native public, like this woman – also believes the ongoing tumult to be some sappy melodrama downstream from a bit of entirely optional chud mischief, or maybe misunderstanding due to the insufficiently vigorous mandatory introduction to the State cult of Reason (that starts at 3 for the French).

Didn’t LePenne come in second in the most recent elections? With a serious chance as well? Seems like this just boosted her odds

Have you looked Le Pen's plans for the banlieues? They might surprise you with their relative modesty.

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