Ophelia's Journal.

Penelope · Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 12:48 pm Post subject:

Ophelia said:-

I was told that these were issues you discussed -- if at all-- only with your family, or your bosom friends.

Ophelia - please continue to discuss. I am listening, and because we are in Europe together I am taking note.

My son, who has lived in Luton, Bedfordshire, in England is convinced that we are manipulated - he lived in Luton where there is a large immigrant population from all over the world. It is a real melting pot.

He liked to hear the muslim call to prayer when he was going to college in the morning.....he didn't mind it in the least. But there were people stiring up division.....

Divide and separate and weaken. We can get along with one another......we have been wondering if there is a move to separate us.

I am reading your journal and sharing it with those who are younger than myself. Please continue....but know that there is love....it is all we need, it is all that matters....it is all there is.....

I send you my great affection. P[/i]

Ophelia · Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 6:17 pm Post subject:

Hello Penelope, and thanks again. Smile

What you are suggesting is new to me.
I now have an idea where this enquiry is taking me, and it's nothing like this, I don't think that there is a plot or a conspiracy among the wealthy or the people in power.

What is unfolding is a sort of drama and saga where so many groups and individuals are contributing, not only the obvious people from the far right.

Today has been an excellent day for my quest.

I started by deciding I would be positive and go back to Ms Guenif-Souilamas. I printed an article she had written on the net, and found out that I could read and understand it.

At this precise moment my luck turned.

Ms G S brought almost nothing new, and neither did the next writer this led to.
This did not annoy me, as I wasn't expecting to find anything concrete or helpful at this stage. I realized once more I didn't even know what my questions were, so far I had been building a list of angles from writers from all political backgrounds which did NOT interest me.

Article number three was VERY interesting, and as aften with the internet all you need is one breakthrough, and this leads you to all sorts of other writings that are relevant. My printer has been working like mad, and by now I have entered the stage of "overwhelming information", which is a very nice change.

I followed each new lead, and at the end of the day this brought me back to my favourite site in French, "Riposte Laïque" , and finally to Education, another of the players in the game.

Very interesting article on Education, and then it was reward time: anybody who has followed me this far gets to share the reward.

This has brought me directly to what I had the feeling would be my conclusion at some stage in the future: stand up comics, who are both our saving grace in this often sorry tale and a means of becoming better people by laughing at our shortcomings, thus thinking about problems and bringing liberating laughter, instead of resorting to the old head-in-the-sand method.

Generally we don't respond well to preaching and moralizing injuction, and we have had so much of this in recent years-- I put moralizing speeches and writings among the players in the drama.

The documents are both excellent-- about Education, so only distantly related to my theme. The first one is only audio-- in French--, everything is spot on. Laughing

The second one is a video by Les Inconnus , who are very famous.
I had to watch it twice to make sure that everything was 100% bogus, and the pupils were acting as well. The setting is a real school , they don't all look like this but some do (my school is a treasure of historical architecture and renovation, but this is the exception, not the rule) . No wonder not much learning gets done... Anyway, the only thing I can't ascertain from the video is whether the classroom itself is genuine. It looks like they've built one on purpose for the sketch in the basement or the garage of the school-- I've never seen anything like this but who knows.

http://storage.canalblog.com/72/09/209246/9969306.swf

http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/education%2Bnationale/vide o/x3q607_les-inconnus-education-nationale_fun

Penelope · Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 6:32 pm Post subject:

Thank you for those links Ophelia, I will look at them and pass them on.

I was not referring to a conspiracy from the Government or the wealthy, but I do mistrust the far right political groups. Not a conspiracy though, just a tendency to purposely and methodically stir up trouble and unrest. Wink

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 10:27 am Post subject:

I think I didn't mention the link between the civil unrest in 2005 and 2007 and immigration.

Both times the fighting started after an incident with the police in Clichy sous Bois, a susburb outside Paris.

On October 27, 2005, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who were trying to escape from police check and questioning, hid in a power station, and were consequently electrocuted.
Relations with the police had been bad before and anger erupted.

There were never any political demands during the next three weeks: starting with the young people who lived in the same housing project (Cité HLM), the only explanation given was hatred for the police, who they said continuously behaved in a racist way by targeting non-whites in their identity checks for example.

On November 26, 2007, two teengers, S Mouchin and S Larami, driving a small motorbike ("mini moto") clashed with a police car on patrol in Villiers le Bel, also a suburb outside Paris. They died in the accident. The police in the car were not at fault (this was confirmed by eye witnesses).

Below you will find a link with 3 photos of a housing estate in Clichy.

A lot of the problems center on this type of buildings from the 1960's. They were built in haste, and cheaply, because the demand for housing was soaring. They were not meant to last over a few decades, and indeed a lot of efforts have been made locally, when those buildings have been torn down and replaced by neighbourhoods that are completely different and where people say they are pleased to live.

The majority of the buildings are still standing, and over the years this architecture has become the symbol of hopelessness.

I'm referring to the 2nd and 3rd photos below (the first one being City Hall!).
As far as I know they are not slums ; inside the flats are simple but decent -- as opposed to some slums that are left and either rented illegally or occupied without permission in some really old buildings in central Paris.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clichy-sous-Bois

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 4:00 pm Post subject:

As I read and write some things are still difficult to understand: for example the rioters' motivations; I doubt that hating the police accounts for everything.

The explanation which is given over and over again by the left (for me that's left wing political parties, mainly the Socialist party) is economic deprivation, lack of prospects, hopelessness. My feeling for the moment is that this covers some 60 % of the ground, and however detailed this analysis gets it's still someone's explanation of what they think others think.

The rioters gave no interviews (not because journalists didn't try...) and they certainly haven't written books. Audrey wrote something about stretching one's mind -- my mind works in overdrive mode when I try to understand this.
There are so many obstacles. France has a tradition of protests; if the protests turned violent one would disapprove of the violence but think about the political agenda.
You can fight the police anywhere, but I would have thought if you wanted to show that you resent the system you would be willing to walk half a mile and destroy the cars of a wealthy neighbourhood instead of the second hand cars of your neighbours, who are as poor as you are.

The explanation is that these gangs identify with a small, local territory in which they operate and which they defend, as they consider it belongs to them.
Sometimes though different gangs meet in Paris to fight other gangs from the suburbs.
By gang I mean group but not involved in dealing drugs, this is controlled by a different lot who have better things to do than fight the police in the streets.
Some of my irreverent thoughts on the subject are:

During the three weeks in 2005 I wished for rain.
Several nights of constant rain would, I think, have made quite a difference.

In the end the Ministry of the Interior announced that things were under control because the police had arrested all the leaders; it seemed believable at the time but what people were privately saying was that there were no more cars to burn in those neighbourhoods.

When people ask why they destroyed the day care centres in their own neighbourhoods when they knew the kids who went there, the explanation given is that when you despair you turn against yourself, as happens when inmates mutilate themselves in prison.
I accept this to some extent; however, this seems to be a pattern more common among women than men.

I believe they were selfish, they were all young males, they were not the ones who would go to work the next day and would have no solution for day care for the kids.

Also it was clear that for some kids this was just great fun: even in quiet places like my town you would see them driving past on a motorbike, one holding the kerosene container, the other striking the match, both laughing.
This is an element that was ignored by the media (but then it was also wise not to mention this at the time).

One more thing: I learnt much later that although the whole thing had lasted three weeks, it actually meant about four nights of fighting at each place. In one analysis of events, the end was not called by the police, but by the local drug dealers: fighting was bad for business, attracted too many police and too much attention, so each local drug baron told the fighters how many nights of interruption he would tolerate, thus spelling the law.

Finally, the picture that keeps filling my mind on the topic is that of the children of SOWETO in 1976, marching because the the South African government had decided that their schooling, previously done in English, would now have to be in the language of the ruling party, Afrikaans, a language they did not understand.

I keep putting this picture away because each situation is different and I've got to make the greater effort of understanding something which is happening at home.

Ophelia · Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 9:20 pm Post subject: The police.

The police and poor suburbs.

My friend Alix knows more about French current affairs than I do, and I often asked her why there seemed to be so many problems between the police and young people from the suburbs.
She always seemed to answer that the police adopted a provocative behaviour and that they were racist-- which is what the young people always say on television.

I was not convinced. I'm willing to concede that there are as many racists in the police as the general population (which is not zero), and that it is likely that you will find more xenophobia among groups like the police and the army than in, say, Education.

I thought that perhaps difficult working conditions, such as being often insulted and attacked , or having to fight drug dealers perhaps made you intolerant in the end.

Yet it did not add up. I was sure that the French police were disciplined.
A police corps that had fought during civil unrests for three weeks and neither hurt nor injured anybody could only be a disciplined organization.
it followed that if the right orders were given there would be no racist behaviour, or behaviour that would be perceived as being racist.

I started with little knowledge of current affairs, but I do know about government. What I needed was an insider's view, instead of the usual interviews, and as with other branches of government the pressure not to share what you know is getting stronger all the time.

Before I tell the sorry tale about the police, I'll say that the same scenario, with different actors, keeps being played over and over again.

For example, a few years ago Tony Blair announced that his Government was going to do away with the waiting lists in the National Health Service in the UK. Having lived there and having heard so many stories about the waiting lists, I knew this could not be done without hiring more doctors and nurses, which of course they were not doing. So when Tony Blair later announced success, it could only be bogus, but you only wonder just HOW they cheat. I mean, these are democracies, not the Soviet Union, you can't just make up bogus results.

Then a few years later I asked a friend of mine who had just retired and had been working for the National Health Service. She said that they had got rid of the waiting lists by making sure a consultant saw the patient--once, to assess what his problem was. Then he was put on a second waiting list, one that was just as long as the previous one, a list for actual treatment of the problem that had been diagnosed.

I saw a documentary on TV a few months ago about another branch of government, the Agence Nationale Pour l'Emploi, dealing with unemployment, helping unemployed people to find jobs.
For some reason it has never worked well, and morale is low, for the employees and the unemployed.

Their hierarchy found out that the results were poor, and started demanding results, actually telling local branches that promotions and bonuses would depend on reaching set targets.
This is what they do in companies, but then if you're selling something it's easy to check whether you're making more money than before or not.

It's absurd to think that you can set targets in social services.

At the ANPE, branches all over the country started making bogus lists of bogus people who had supposedly found jobs thanks to them.

Also, and this also works well in any kind of service, they convinced large numbers of people to remove their names from the lists: unemployment in France had declined!

Naturally, things are still going on the way they were before the TV programme.

Now, back to the police.
I did find a few websites where people who had left the police or had retired, and also one man who is a trade union leader were giving the insider's view I had been looking for.

The situation is actually even more idiotic than in the two previous examples, and the consequences for society can be dire.

Ophelia · Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 10:14 pm Post subject: The police, continued.

The system that was put in place when Nicolas Sarkozy worked as Interior Minister is as follows: each commander in the hierarchy must show that his men are effective policemen and get results, which are measured statistically
by:

- how many offences policemen report

- then , how many of those they prosecute

- how many of those offenders are actually taken to the police station

- how many offenders are then kept in police custody

- how many of those problems they can declare as "solved".

Now, any rookie soon finds out that what is going to get him his boss's approval and high marks on the statistics chart is not going to be done by actually tackling serious crimes, or any type of crime at all fo that matter.
Investigative police work means time and manpower, and in the end you only get "1" problem solved officially to put on your list.
You don't get more credit than for arresting a teenager with a little cannabis in his pocket.

So everybody 's now looking for petty criminals.

But this is still not enough.
They've created special units called BAC who specialize with actual interventions in places like the suburbs.

They find that cannabis does not give enough results, so they start asking young people in the suburbs for their ID cards. Not having one is an offence, so you can take them to the station.

No wonder I kept wondering WHY they were always doing those ID checks, it really made no sense.

And if that's still not enough, use provocation: some of the young men will rise to the challenge, and insulting a police officer is an offense, so you can take them to the police station...

The police officers who are now writing are disgusted.
They notice that all those methods go together with less respect for the public.
For example, during initial training, and then later in the streets, members of the public who are being checked for one thing or another are called "crapauds" (toads).

Then one day, we all wake up and hear about some more civil unrest.
Sociologists write more articles saying that this is all due to economic hardships, the failure of the school system and general racist behaviour on the part of the citizenry.

About police meeting their targets, there's even worse, if possible.

One thing in which many policemen are actively involved is finding the right number of undocumented immigrants who can be sent back to their homeland.

I don't have a general view as to for or against the repatriation of undocumented and illegal immigrants -- contrary to my compatriots, who mostly seem to have chosen a camp.
I had thought that people were arrested because they were really going to be repatriated; a harsh system, but one with a logic.

In the new system, the main thing is the arrest. In many cases they know that the person, though undocumented, will be allowed to stay in France, for example because his children were born in France.
But this counts as an arrest, and even better, they can then re-arrest him later, release him, and start again.

One of the articles I read explained that Sarkozy's views copied the model set by Rudi Giulliani as Mayor of New York, something called "Quality of life" policy. Apparently the difference is that in the US when such things are done the inventor proudly claims this is his idea, whereas in France they are now using the ideas while still pretending that things are just as they were before, only more efficient.

Nobody ever says "I'm going to use that great idea they had in the States 15 years ago and have long since abandoned."

Another day in Sarkoland.

Ophelia · Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 3:43 pm Post subject: The police

Today's C Dans l'Air programme on Channel 5 was about the police.
Two policemen (one trade union leader and one actually ex police) confirmed what I was writing yesterday.
They mentioned the high rate of suicide among the police and again the crazy targets.

They explained a phenomenon that has been widely discussed but I couldn't quite figure out: recently in Paris ID checks in the street or the underground have been mostly on the basis of race.
The thing is policemen get daily quotas of illegal immigrants they have to find by country of origin. So on a given day they will be asked to find so many illegals from Mali. The only way of meeting that quota within the imparted time is to stop every black person they meet.

One French black man said that he was now being checked by the police every single day as he walks from his lodgings to the College where he studies.

Then, on the evening news, they gave the example of a man from the Ivory Coast who had come to France on a tourist visa for three months.
At the end of his stay, he was getting ready to go to the airport-- he had a return ticket-- to go back home when he was arrested.
It was hard to imagine how the misunderstanding could arise, as he spoke fluent French. The poor man really sounded bewildered.

The police kept him for 10 days: again this would be put on the quota sheets, and then there probably was more confusion. They decided they would forcibly send him back to the Ivory Coast (at taxpayers' expense).
Then they changed their minds and he was allowed to use his own ticket to fly home-- ten days late.

Once a story makes the evening news it sends the signal that the three main channels ( channels 1, 2 and 3) are no longer using what I call self-censorship about this news item (there's no real censorship of course but it's always interesting to see what remains on the internet and newspapers and what makes it to the evening news. They always seem to show the same items on all three channels, just organized differently.
This again is not typical of French channels: CNN for example organizes differently, but whenever I've watched CNN and BBC World in succession they showed the very same things-- on BBC World the anchorman has a British accent though).

This reminds me of things that I read when Rudi Giuliani was mayor of New york City.
It seems that there comes a point when a policy is no longer acceptable to the population.

Even if Nicolas Sarkozy could be persuaded to change his methods the problem of how to tackle illegal immigration would remain.

It seems that the country wants two things at once: people want illegal immigration to decrease, but they don't want to see illegal immigrants being arrested by the police.

I have no solution.

The method that was used by Socialist governments in the 1980's and 1990's was absurd as well, in a different way: the cases of illegal immigrants were taken to the courts. The courts did their jobs, and when the immigrant did not qualify for a work permit he was served with papers that ordered him to leave the country.

Then nothing happened, because no policemen were assigned to the task of enforcing the court orders.
So, no shocking pictures on the news, but nothing got done, and people felt the government were not doing their jobs.

Ophelia · Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 9:08 am Post subject: Immigration in France: the jews.

The Jews.

Most of the time, problems which became acute in the twentieth century were
the culmination of centuries of strife and horrors committed by both sides, as for example in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, or more recently the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

A few years ago I decided to check the history of the Jews in Europe to see if something had escaped me and if there had been historic reasons which had led Europeans to hate them.
All I found was the things I already knew: from the beginning, the Catholic Church had accused them of killing Jesus Christ.
Then, in the Middle Ages, when Christians were not allowed to lend money (this was called "usury") the Jews became money-lenders.

Owing money to Jews made the Christians even more resentful than before, and led to the creation of the myth of a jewish type with all sorts of evil characteristics.

World War II ( Wikipedia)

Ophelia

The Vietnamese war of Inpendence.

Wikipedia

"Fighting lasted from 1950 to March 1954, when the Viet Minh won the decisive victory against French forces at the gruelling Battle of Dien Bien Phu. This led to the partition of Vietnam into the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North, under Viet Minh control, and the State of Vietnam in the South, which had the support of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The events of 1954 also marked the end of French involvement in the region, and the beginnings of serious US commitment to South Vietnam which led to the Vietnam War."

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was a disaster for the French army in the area that we called Indochine.
This is an example of the worst possible ending of colonization: after years of fighting and a final bloodbath.

Human losses: I'd like to start with those of the local people (who were not yet called Vietnamese) but I haven't found any figures yet.

Between 1946 and 1955, losses in the French Army were: 103.000 dead and 84.00 wounded. Not all those people were from France, as the locals also enrolled in the french Army. Of those, 47.000 died at the battle of Dien pien Phu.

The figure of 103,000 dead is significant, I think, if you compare with the casualties of the French Army during World War II: 250,000 dead (the Battle of France was short.)

Penelope · Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 5:30 pm Post subject:

Ophelia - Quote:-

- how many offences policemen report

- then , how many of those they prosecute

- how many of those offenders are actually taken to the police station

- how many offenders are then kept in police custody

- how many of those problems they can declare as "solved".

What you say here about the Police and the NHS is also true about the teaching profession and many others..........

We, at this house call it 'Ticking Boxes' -

We feel that people are not allowed to get on with doing an effective job - because they are kept busy 'ticking boxes' to say that this, that and the other has been done.......an ineffectual and unsatisfying system.

Ophelia:-

I don't know if I am supposed to post on here - and whether I am spoiling the run of your Journal......so please delete my posts......

Ophelia · Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 6:16 pm Post subject:

Penelope wrote

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 7:31 am Post subject:

A couple of months ago, as I was reading those boring books whose authors seemed determined to share no information, I came upon one lone sentence which started me thinking.

It said that in the 1960's large numbers of French people had hated and resented the new immigrants from the Maghreb because of the feeling of humiliation which resulted from the loss of our colonies.

This is when things began to make sense for me.
This interersting idea was not analyzed or discussed by the author, discretion was the word.
I could understand the silence: who would want to be associated with a group of people who had such uncharitable feelings?
The usual idea was: if anything in the country's past is embarrassing, bury it: your children will never know that those things happened, and will not ask questions-- and incidentally, the wounds will never heal.

I had expected that people would feel guilty for their colonial past (and this is also the case) and that the immigrants were an embarrassment because they reminded people of what they had done wrong .
I had expected people to be relieved that the Algerian war (1954- 1962) had finally ended, and of course some or many were relieved.
I thought they would also be relieved that they would no longer be a colonial power with so much on their conscience.

The gap between France of the 1960's and France in 2008, and the fact that these facts are never discussed, had not prepared me for the idea of a widespread feeling of humiliation.

I knew that from then on my enquiry would be getting somewhere.
Often this is all you need, one idea that will be your starting point and that you can use as a thread as you read about earlier decades, in this case the 1950's and 1960's.


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