“Dead for nothing” read the t-shirts of mourners the morning after two boys were killed in a ghettoized banlieue suburb of Paris on Oct. 27. The two boys, part of the vast communities of sans-papiers in France, had been playing soccer with friends and fled when police began conducting a raid to check for IDs.
The source of the rage that has since spread through dozens of French communities and surfaced in Belgium and Germany as well was not Muslim fanatics who refused to “become French” or lazy vagabonds who preferred to torch cars than find employment, but a systematic program of repression that, in the name of promoting order, ignored basic human rights and inflamed smoldering discontent.
Had French society allowed for nonviolent social movements to form and flourish, violence would have seemed politically inefficient. Because immigrants and the working-class are so effectively shut out of French society, they have no other way to effect change than to violently demand it.
More on the flip.
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