REASON'S REPUBLIC (via Tom Corcoran):

"Red Belt" Riots (Stephen Schwartz, 11/07/2005, Tech Central Station)

Even 26 years ago, it was obvious that France and its North African communities were dangerously polarized. The outcome of that contradiction is now visible in the rioting that has convulsed the Parisian region, and over the past weekend Aubervilliers appeared as a tragic dateline in global media. The suburb is an historical part of what was once known as the "red belt," centered in the region of Seine-Saint-Denis, along with other riot-riven places, such as Clichy-sous-Bois and Vitry-sur-Seine. They took their nickname from their long municipal rule by the hard Stalinists of the French Communist Party. They were centers of light industry, and early in the mornings I would leave the apartment and go to a small, shabby bistro where native French factory workers downed their first alcohol of the day, and their cups of strong coffee, smoking Gauloises and Gitanes while waiting for their shifts to start. Arabs did not frequent such cafés and did not work in the local plants.

The past Stalinism of the "red belt" was underscored by the names of streets, metro stations, and squares, which included Stalingrad, Lenin, and similar memorials to Bolshevism. But I came to know uglier secrets by living among young North Africans. The neofascist, anti-immigrant National Front (FN) of Jean-Marie Le Pen had begun taking votes away from the disaffected workers who had long supported the Stalinists. The latter responded by trying to outdo Le Pen and his thuggish followers in immigrant-bashing. In 1980 I and others were genuinely shocked when the Communist mayor of Vitry-sur-Seine, Paul Mercieca, with the backing of top Communist boss George Marchais and the Party's all-powerful Central Committee, commanded a bulldozer in demolishing a building where 300 immigrant workers from the Black African country of Mali were living. As an anti-Stalinist Communist, I already disliked Marchais intensely. Like most of the French, I was aware that he had been a volunteer laborer for the Nazis and had only joined the Communists after World War II. Marchais sported something I called, and still call, "political rictus": a permanent grin that I believed, and still believe, was an involuntary psychological feature reflecting the need to conceal deeply malicious intentions.

Observing the gap between the French and their neighbors of North African origin, I learned another disturbing truth: that the latter had a deep fear of the Parisian police. I had more ready cash than my comrades, and one Friday night invited them all to go with me to the wonderful urban district of Saint-Michel, with its glamorous cafés, bookshops, and lots of cute girls. Saleh and Cherif refused. They said they were not safe in Saint-Michel on weekend nights, even though both possessed legal status and were quite respectable in their dress and manners, notwithstanding their radical politics. They told me that even with their papers in order North Africans living in Paris could be picked up by the police without any pretext, beaten, and even killed.

Aubervilliers, Clichy, Vitry were and are ghettoes, and are now aflame. France must confront the reality of its bad history with minorities of various kinds, but especially with North African Arabs, who have never been forgiven for the beating the Algerians inflicted on France in the late 1950s, as evoked in the dramatic film The Battle of Algiers. How long ago it all seems now; in 1965 I took my girlfriends on high school dates to see Gillo Pontecorvo's film, enthused by its revolutionary vision. Nothing of that world seems to have survived. How much of it will remain intact in the ashes of the "red belt" I cannot say, but it cannot be much.

Notwithstanding the hue and cry that will be raised against Muslims in France, in the aftermath of this nightmare, the truth about French bigotry remains. A French politician declared that Turkey should not enter Europe because the latter is a "Christian" continent. Yet France hates the infamous "Polish plumbers," who supposedly are enabled to "steal jobs" from French workers, as much as it dislikes Arabs and other Muslims -- even though the Polish immigrant's family doubtless attends Catholic mass more than the average French family, which has been indoctrinated in compulsory secularism over several generations. France glorifies "its" anti-Nazi resistance, which until D-Day in 1944 was made up almost entirely of stateless Jews, Spanish Republican refugees, Armenians, and even some North African Arab revolutionaries -- all typically considered "un-French." That was another dirty little secret I learned about the French, so long ago in Paris. I already knew that the majority of French citizens had cooperated in handing over their Jewish and other "undesirable" neighbors to the Nazis.

You're un-American if you don't share the ideals of those who settled the land and Founded the Republic. You're un-French if you aren't French.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 7, 2005 9:15 AM