And here’s the kicker: the French Interior Ministry described the night as “rather calm and without major incident.” Dow Jones [via NASDAQ] gives us the exact stats: “The interior ministry had earlier said 445 vehicles were set on fire overnight, but later revised that figure to 1,147. The number of arrests and cars torched topped last year’s tally of 259 people detained and 372 vehicles burned.” So, uh how could that possibly be construed as a calm? It all depends whose car is set alight. “‘There were very few targetings of fire trucks and clashes with security forces, in particular in the suburbs,’ noted the interior ministry in a statement. When clashes occurred, they were ‘brief and sporadic,’ it added. There was no damage to buildings.” Oh, that’s alright then. And how did the Parisians authorities accomplish this little feat? “France mobilized 35,000 police and 50,000 firefighters to maintain order during the New Year fete.”
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1147 vehicles set fire? “rather calm and without major incident”. Oh yes… Perhaps they were expecting 2000+ vehicles to be burned.
Apart from the clear and present danger of doing anything “the French way”, the US bailout should include car burning to stimulate demand.
I recommend any GM/Chrysler vehicle you see should be set fire too. In one act, you could eliminate all evidence of historically crappy product, wipe out the upside-down loans via insurance scam and stimulate demand.
Clearly the Fed have the power to authorize car burning. It’s right there in the TARP “notes” (rather than rules).
Queue anti-French and socialism rants from the Best and the Brightest in three, two, one…
“France’s poor high-immigrant suburbs exploded into rioting in 2005 and there have been outbreaks of violence and simmering tensions ever since.
The areas are home to rundown housing estates where unemployment runs high and young descendants of African and Arab immigrants say they feel left out of mainstream French society.”
So good to see the Diversity-ists showing respect for others’ beliefs and traditions in the country they’ve chosen to call “home”…
Sort of like Halloween in DET…
Only different.
Hey… that is one way to create demand for new cars. Perhaps they are on to something there. GM.. are you listening?
I lived in Paris for 4 years and 1,147 cars is a lot even for the Paris-pyros…They just LOVE to burn things (Other people’s things).
“Queue anti-French and socialism rants from the Best and the Brightest in three, two, one…”
Sounds like we’ve hit a sore point with the Intolerant Left.
I’ve heard they like to hold the occasional car-b-que over there but 1147 vehicles is the most I’ve heard of in one evening of revelry.
France’s poor high-immigrant suburbs exploded into rioting in 2005 and there have been outbreaks of violence and simmering tensions ever since.
The areas are home to rundown housing estates where unemployment runs high and young descendants of African and Arab immigrants say they feel left out of mainstream French society.
The word that the PC journalists won’t mention: Muslims. They do, however blame French society for making them feel left out. It’s about poverty and unemployment and being excluded, not about a visceral hatred of a western society that supports them with welfare. Dependency often breeds contempt.
But, hey, 24 Muslim countries aren’t enough. Let’s give them another state, or if you include the Hamas reichlit in Gaza, two.
You know; the French love a party and a good beat down – so you have car burning and the CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité) existing happily together.
It’s a French thing – you wouldn’t understand. Really. It makes no sense….
Correction: reichlet
For some reason the software isn’t letting me edit my comment.
The French republic is not without its problems but they’ll always have the Americans to teach them about disaffected minorities and winning strategies in Indochina and the Middle East…
I’ll bet it was all just a beat up over some loose trim they found on their Meganes.
Try that in Texas and blood would be flowing
MikeInCanada has it right: It’s a French thing. And it’s a time-honored custom in other parts of Europe as well. This is what I wrote to Robert Farago today who asked me to comment:
Setting cars on fire seems to be a pastime of European radicals. The blase reaction of the Paris police is a reflection of it happening all the time.
In Germany, the main car burning season is May 1. Last year, I was in Hamburg in the first week of May with an American associate, and he gasped: “We arrive here in the midst of a civil war! Riot police! Cars on fire!”
Me: “Ah, forgot to tell you. May 1st.”
A New Year’s eve event in Berlin is chronicled at German Yahoo News.
New Year’s Riots in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg
On new year’s eve, up to 1000 people launched an attack with rocks and fireworks at a police station and several squad cars in the Berlin district Prenzlauer Berg. Shortly after midnight, unknown persons who were in the midst of a large crowd of people started hurling objects at the police and their squad cars, the police reports. The windows of a tram car were also destroyed. Three windows of the police station shattered. There was an attempt to shoot a missile into the station. After more police arrived, the situation went back to normal. One policeman was injured by flying shards of glass. Three rioters were arrested. One rioter was remanded in custody. The other two, 18 and 20 year old, were released after having been charged with aggravated breach of the public peace, and attempted Gefangenenbefreiung (I have no idea what the legal term is for when you forcibly try to free someone who just had been arrested by the police.)
The story received scant attention. Trust me, this is nothing new. I was 19 in 1968. I should know ….
Why exactly should cars not be the object of agression?
How many people get murdered every day? Isn’t it odd when on average less cars get destroyed than people?
Torching cars is silly and useless. And usually it is the cars that belong to the poor or working class that get destroyed. But we’re talking about an underclass that, due to miserable schooling and a reactionary muslim culture, has little chance of leaving the projects. Better to torch than to knife.
And that’s the “civilized” first world… LOL
Another thing for the bailout supporters to whine about.
“Look at what they are doing in France to stimulate new vehicle demand, why can’t the US allow this kind of thing to help the Detroit automakers. It’s probably the fault of the southern Senators, they probably came up some bogus ‘burning cars violates property rights’ argument to help the transplants.”
Ronnie Schreiber:
“Dependency often breeds contempt.”
The Detroit News and Automotive News have made us quite aware of that.
Don’t forget that the “PC journalists” heavily supported the Detroit automaker bailouts with their rhetoric and their presentation of the issue. And still could not shift the public opposition to it.
They’re definitely on to something here. One could approach “burning cars” from the perspective of “resource recovery.” That’s what they call it when the garbage man takes his haul to a power plant where the garbage is burned and the heat powers the electricity generators. Then the smoke is scrubbed clean of pollution.
So now that we know the government hands over checks to insurance firms and banks without asking “Where did the money go?” this idea has a lot of legs.
Have you seen your property and casualty insurance company asking for a bailout? No.
So all we need to do is haul our gas guzzlers to the resource recovery centers, and turn the scrap into the sorts of vehicles that the ecoweenies love! What are we doing sitting around reading people’s blogs for? There’s GOLD in them thar parking lots!
Genius. We need rioters to start burning cars here so we…. have to buy new ones! Of course, then we’ll have to bail out the insurance industry…
@Pista
I believe the lesson went the other way. Try cracking a history book. “Hell in a Very Small Place” by Bernard Fall is a good place to start.
Compared to the monthlong riots that rocked Paris and surrounding suburbs for nearly a month a few years back, New Year’s in Paris does seem quite calm, relatively speaking.
The French republic is not without its problems but they’ll always have the Americans to teach them about disaffected minorities and winning strategies in Indochina and the Middle East…
As Lewis Lancaster, professor emeritus of far Eastern religions at Berkley told me, “compared to Europeans and Asians, Americans are rank amateurs when it comes to racism”.
To my knowledge, unlike French policemen circa 1939-1944, no American policemen ever put any minorities on trains to death camps. While it’s true that America has had it’s problems too, have the French ever given restitution to Jews the way the US has tried to make amends to Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II? There were more Vichy collaborators than members of the underground resistance.
As for winning strategies in Indochina, you can compare how the French were overrun at Dien Bien Phu to the successful defense by US Marines of their FOB at Khe Sahn during the Tet Offensive, a massive military failure of the North Vietnamese. If you don’t believe me, consult the memoirs of Gen. Giap. While Gen. Westmoreland may not have had a handle on counter-insurgency, he successfully baited the North Vietnamese into thinking that they could replay Dien Bien Phu, to the detriment of the 2,000 or so dead NVA soldiers found surrounding Khe Sahn after the siege was lifted.
Regarding the Middle East, many of the current problems are not unrelated to French colonialism after the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following WWI. Long before they decided to reinvent themselves as “Palestinians” sometime after 1948, the Arabs in western Palestine (the 25% of Palestine that didn’t become an Arab state known as “Jordan”) considered themselves to be Syrians. This made sense as many of them, if not most, had migrated to western Palestine from Syria to take advantage of economic opportunities due to the growth of the Zionist enterprise in the late 19th and early 20th century. Those Arabs deeply resented the fact that the British mandate over Palestine and the French occupation of Syria had separated them from their homeland. Before Arabs used the term “naqba”, catastrophe, to describe how they ran away from Palestine in 1948, they used it to describe how Britain and France carved up their “homeland”. This resentment directly led to the so-called Arab Revolt against the British in the 1930s, when Arab bomb throwers killed almost a thousand Jews.
no_slushbox,
We can count on you to use any excuse or news item to bash Detroit.
Detroit-Iron,
Shhh! You’re not supposed to challenge the prevailing narrative that a plucky band of rubber sandal and pajama clad VC militarily defeated the United States.
While it’s common for people to mock the “Domino Theory” (I think yesterday someone on Autoblog compared it to supply chain related arguments in favor of loans to the domestic automakers) and “Vietnamization”, the historical facts are that ARVN was a competent fighting force that successfully repelled a much larger invasion in 1973 than the one that overran South Vietnam in 1975. The main difference was that a craven US Senate had voted in the meantime to cut off all military aid, including carrier based air support, to the South.
As for the Domino Theory, before the Vietnam War, communism, the USSR and the PRC were ascendant. After 1975, few countries embraced communism. Unfortunately for the Cambodians that trend didn’t start until after the Khmer Rouge decided that genocide was preferable to “reeducation”. Vietnam was expensive for the US in blood and treasure, but it was hardly without its costs for the patrons of North Vietnam.
Ronnie Schreiber:
Above I mentioned the Detroit automakers and the Detroit news, but said nothing generically about Detroit.
I just thought your “[d]ependency often breeds contempt” comment was spot on; it explains why people do things like make generalize southerners as illiterate and unable to use the internet when their Senators don’t support particular agendas.
Farago? You are letting this flamefest continue without comment?
Geez. All I did was say that focusing on a cars horsepower numbers was not smart…and I got the dreaded anti-flame police all over me.
Guess it’s because I didn’t use pretty enough language and historical references to state my case…..**sigh**
Ummmm. Actually, we in the US don’t have much to brag about. Isn’t several burned cars, burned and looted stores, and scores of arrests for drunken stupidity about the par score for the average NCAA-winning college campus? Or is it only stupid when non-Americans do it?
Ummmm. Actually, we in the US don’t have much to brag about. Isn’t several burned cars, burned and looted stores, and scores of arrests for drunken stupidity about the par score for the average NCAA-winning college campus? Or is it only stupid when non-Americans do it?
Right, that happens once a year in one town.
There are 2 or 3 car fires every night in Paris’s suburbs. This 1147 cars is a special celebration.
Hippo:
Try that in Texas and blood would be flowing
+1. Certain crimes are much less common in the Land of the Carry Permit.