‘ Youths’ Torch Buses in Paris
Gateway Pundit has the round-up
I know that I have linked to this 2002 essay by Theodore Dalrymple before, but it is worth going back to from time to time, if for no other reason than how remarkably prescient it was. If you haven’t read it before, I highly suggest it. If you have read it, read it again. Here’s a taste:
The average visitor gives not a moment’s thought to these Cités of Darkness as he speeds from the airport to the City of Light. But they are huge and important—and what the visitor would find there, if he bothered to go, would terrify him.
A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—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.
“If you are not one of them, you are against them.”
Strange – where have I heard that before?