With the end of EURO 2016, Nice and its inhabitants must have thought that they had closed their account with violence. The football tournament had been the scene of some violent moments when “supporters” hailing from different nations wreaked havoc on many of the host towns in France. Nice was one of them. When the violence among fans erupts we tend to hear two arguments. Firstly there are those who claim that these are not “real fans”, that they are only on site in search of violence and ways to display their pent up anger. Secondly the reaction this time round was to threaten deportation. Some of the fans arrested after violent nights were in fact returned to their country of origin.
Last night, during the 14th July celebrations on the Nice Promenade, an individual who has now been identified as a French-Tunisian ploughed into the huge crowd watching the event with a van and ended his mad drive by firing shots into the crowd before being put down by policemen. President Hollande stated that this attack had a “terrorist character” that cannot be denied and that we need to do “everything we can to fight against terrorism’. Once again a Western nation squares up against an invisible enemy…. a chimera. The reaction to such events is still a siege mentality of us vs them – as though there is an invisible army among us ready to strike again and against whom measures have to be taken.
It is now almost 15 years since the brutal attacks on the Twin Towers in the US and it seems that we have not moved much further forward. The war on the ground in Syria, Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East gives us the illusion that a battle is being won or lost. Daesh gives an ephemeral shape and face to “the enemy” whenever one is needed but soon fades in a cloud of confusing and contradictory information peppered with amateur youtube videos of beheadings and crucifixions far from the “civilised West” that is under attack.
Reactions closer to home are very much like those we witness in the football violence month. An attempt to define “them” (the real fans vs the fake fans) ends up in the simplification of the all encompassing term “terrorist”. Those who sow terror. The knee-jerk reaction fuelled by ignorance is to assemble an identikit based on the cliches – islam, immigrants, arabic…. – and ask that all of these get thrown out. Donald Trump? A hero. Give us more walls. Suddenly the Brexit vote does not look so dumb. Just as in the football months , just as every time a mad idea to “purify” society seems to be taking over the idea of “deportation” begins to gain in popularity. But will it work?
If, as the reports are claiming, this was a French-Tunisian, then blaming the EU and its policy on immigration has little or nothing to do with the events. Tunisia was a French colony until the mid-fifties. Persons of Tunisian, Algerian, and Moroccan origin coloured the French landscape adding a touch of diversity long before the sudden awareness on “immigrants” was given a new tinge of alarm by a disgruntled part of the population. Thousands of persons of Maltese and Italian descent pepper the coast of France as they do the north coast of Africa – relics from a time when the concept of free movement across the Mediterranean was much more fluid and economic based than it is today.
The truth seems to lie more in the fact that the perpetrators of recent events labelled as “terrorist” are more likely to be angry misfits in society. We used to call them criminals. They perpetrate violence on large number of people while hanging on to the excuse of “martyrdom” or “vindication” but we should not be side-tracked by the mask that they choose to show when committing the crime. Normal society, acting calmly and rationally, has laws for criminals and sends them to prison. Criminals are not deported, they are punished for their crimes.
The 2000s have been a fertile ground in the Western World for the creation of angry generations of individuals. I have already spoken about this not so long ago (Killing in the name of – June 16th):
The truth is that it is all of society that is threatened – as it always has been – by the existence of misfits and grudge-bearers who would do more than write a letter to the editor complaining about how society’s mores have gone to the dumps. Intent and motive is beside the point if not only to understand how much pent up anger exists or needs to exist in an individual before he resorts to violence. The Orlando and Paris killers may have pinned their banner to ISIS and some contorted view of a religion but the fact remains that their twisted acts are the result of violent social misfits.
It is not even their creed or origin that should be under focus but the reasons why they failed to fit so badly in the societies in which they were brought up. Badly enough to pick up a gun or dagger and kill fellow human beings. Badly enough to not care.
I came across a chat this morning where one of the people (an Australian based individual) was advocating deportation and exit from the EU for France because of the EU’s “immigration policy”. The implication is always the same. The problem is immigration and immigrants. Is it really? Not too far back in time Sarkozy’s government faced huge riots in French suburbia. We read about battles between the police and suburban angry youth burning cars and rioting in the streets outside and around Paris. Was this Islam or immigrant inspired? No it was not.
Western democracies are having to face a bigger problem than terrorism. The bigger problem is the huge number of individuals who no longer feel safe or happy in our society. Economically downtrodden, socially marginalised and with no hope these are the fertile grounds for explosions of anger and acts of desperation. From Orlando to Nice the resorting to angry deeds becomes almost a natural consequence.
Society needs to notice that creating a convenient label such as terrorist or immigrant does not take the monster away. It also needs to be told fast that Trump-like solutions or Farage-like fear mongering are not on the table. Isolation gets nobody nowhere. Rather than concentrating on demonstrations of strength the problem should be tackled at the roots – ironically projects such as the EU intended for economic and social betterment of the peoples of Europe are being hijacked by fearmongerers and the jackals of war.
Listening to Farage, Trump and the like will not solve anything. It will only exacerbate the very problems that we need to be solving.
