As you read this, libraries, beauty salons and gutted cars are still smoking in the streets of France. Once again, French “youths,” as American news organizations delicately call them, have been “rioting.”
Two years ago, turbulent young men across France torched hundreds of vehicles and fought pitched battles with police for three weeks. Then, as now, the rioting erupted after the accidental death of two teenagers in an encounter with police.
We are told that the rioters are expressing their alienation from society, their frustration with a lack of opportunity and their routine persecution by racist police.
This time, the violence is bloodier because the youths are expressing themselves with hunting rifles, not just with Molotov cocktails.
A policeman told The Daily Telegraph, “Last time they wanted to burn cars and buildings. Now they are after us.” Rioters have wounded more than 100 policemen in the past four days, six of them seriously.
Who are these “youths”? No points for guessing that we are not talking here of beret-wearing, Gauloise-smoking Jean-Luc Godard look-alikes.
The mobs are composed of angry, disaffected, mostly unemployed men of Muslim and/or North African extraction. The world is being forcibly reminded again that Western Europe possesses a seething underclass of unassimilated immigrants and their children.
But what these flaming scenes ought to underline — even more than the dangers of ethnic balkanization — is the danger posed to societies that fail to channel their young men into civilized lives of purpose and meaning. That isn’t just a problem in Europe. It’s in Asia, and we have it here, too.
Think for a minute of the marvel of young men. They’re physically powerful, daring, competitive and aggressive. When directed properly, young men are breathtaking sportsmen, brave soldiers, valiant defenders.
But when their natural power is left to drift in darker paths, young men can be the most dangerous creatures alive — whether foolhardy frat boys or violent criminals.
If they fall in with extremist groups, young men are the ones setting fertilizer bombs, driving car bombs into schoolyards, strapping explosives on their bodies.
One young man is regarded as dangerous enough by himself; that’s why he pays more for car insurance than his twin sister. But a surging crowd of estranged young men? There’s nothing more combustible.
In the United States, black commentators such as Bill Cosby and his critics such as University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson have lately argued over who, or what, is to blame for the inertia and misery that have created a pool of young, ill-educated, directionless African-American men wasting their lives in crime andincarceration.
The immediate victims of crime are not the only ones who suffer; our whole society is depleted by the waste and misery wrought by a young criminal class.
In Asia, China’s neighbors view with increasing alarm a surging population of rootless young Chinese males with little prospect ever of forming families. China’s brutal population controls — including forced abortions on women pregnant without state approval — have produced a society with dramatically more men than women.
By some estimates, there are nearly 30 million more young Chinese men than women. Valerie Hudson and Andrea Den Boer, authors of a book about the security implications of this, use the stilted language of the academy to draw an alarming conclusion:
“The security logic of high sex-ratio societies predisposes nations to see some utility in interstate conflict.” That’s war, to the rest of us.
Unlike alienated French youth, China’s unmarried male millions have a chance of finding a job and do not suffer the same social isolation. Nonetheless, an army of frustrated, rootless young men is — an army.
In Lawrence Wright’s brilliant history of al Qaeda, “The Looming Tower,” he describes the group’s appeal to disaffected youth: “Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored.”
Unable to find work, forbidden to chat up girls, thwarted and frustrated yet with young men’s natural desire for action and significance, young Arabs are eager cannon fodder for the world’s most vicious murderer’s club.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
