Molenbeek and East St. Louis not as different as you suggest

Submitted by Dan Simon (Mexico), Dec 31, 2015 at 00:23

Daniel, I strongly disagree with two of your claims: that the partial "no-go zones" in Europe are a product of Western/white self-hatred, and that they're fundamentally different from the crime-ridden minority neighborhoods that plague US cities. Both types of neighborhood are fostered primarily by and for mundane domestic political interests--specifically, the interests of a coalition of constituencies in cultivating a lawless, threatening "client underclass" that will justify an expansion of the coalition's political power and material resources. For this "left" coalition, an alienated, crime-ridden underclass serves multiple purposes:

• It establishes a relatively easily-controlled client constituency that can be milked for votes by the coalition, in exchange for protection and government largesse
• It justifies expanded spending on public assistance and services, which are largely funded by non-coalition members, and staffed by coalition members
• It provides a source of competition and conflict with working-class nativists, who are largely not coalition members
• It boosts crime rates, which disproportionately harms non-coalition members
• It justifies constraints on law enforcers, who are generally not coalition members, and an expanded role for lawyers and political activists, who are mostly coalition members

In the US, as in Europe, the "left" coalition has long indulged, and virulently demonized any attempts to suppress, violent criminality among residents of euphemistically-labeled "inner city" neighborhoods. The coalition routinely treats urban riots, for instance, as justified outbursts of political rebellion despite their obvious criminal nature, including looting and other types of violent mayhem. Coalition commentators in Europe mount similar defenses of rioting and other forms of criminality among immigrant populations in partial "no-go" zones in European cities, resisting all attempts to bring order to them, despite the obvious huge potential benefits to their residents.

As the huge decline in crime in the US from the early 1990s to this day has shown, serious law enforcement efforts can be successful in reducing crime in minority communities, and the results benefit those communities and the cause of integration far more than they benefit the wealthy or the majority in general. However, the value of a crime-ridden client underclass to the "left" coalition has not disappeared, and the latter is intently attempting to revive it in America today, by undermining law enforcement--portraying it as itself lawless and racist--and egging on violent minority militancy in the hope of recreating the chaos of the decades from the late 1960s through the early 1990s.

In Europe, where the political power of the "left" coalition is even more firmly established, there have been virtually no attempts to apply the American solution to the partial "no-go zones", despite the clear precedent of American success. It remains to be seen whether the recent resurgence of nativist politics (some of it quite unsavory in its own right) will succeed in making a dent in the "left" coalition's careful cultivation of its immigrant criminal underclass.

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