Quelle Outrage! The Racist, Fascist Police Are Stopping The Oppressed Third World Youth Gangs From Robbing Us!

The current wave of strikes and blockades that threatens to reduce France to a more catatonic state than usual has an interesting - and slightly frightening - aspect that until now has received only passing mention in most media accounts. It seems that the predominantly Arab and African youth gangs from the banlieue, the ones who engaged in that jolly little orgy of looting and car-burning last autumn, have come into town to play their part in the protests against proposed reforms to French labour laws.

But much to the chagrin of the student radicals and trade unionists spearheading the marches, the young casseurs had not come to town to support voice their opinions about the youth unemployment crisis; they were there to beat up and rob middle class demonstrators, which, while it certainly qualifies as a form of income redistribution, may not have been exactly what the prep school socialists had in mind.

But let it not be said that the Frenchies went back on their principles; despite being ratpacked, beaten, kicked and robbed (see this pleasant picture), they still stood up for the rights of the oppressed third world muggers, as the Guardian reports:

At the edges of the march, plain-clothed police snatch squads grabbed youths, many of them black, and forced them towards riot vans or frisked them as others shouted that the police were "fascists and racist."

It's always been a wet dream of the academic and intellectual left to link up with the visceral power of the underclass, or the lumpen proletariat, as it used to be known in Marxist theory, but results have been mixed at best. One thinks of the 60s radicals and their myopic romanticisation of the Black Panther Party, which ultimately was little better than a street gang with a smattering of revolutionary patter (to be fair, the sociopaths of the Weather Underground were just as guilty of straight-out thuggery, the only difference being that most of them had rich daddies to bail them out of prison). Or, for that matter, the infatuation would be avant-gardeists like Hunter Thompson or the Rolling Stones had with the Hell's Angels and which resulted in a gratuitous ass-kicking for Thompson and the brutal murder of a young Rolling Stones fan.

Of course past totalitarian movements of both the left and right have successfully used the underclass as shock troops when seizing power, but this was generally followed by a liquidation of the stroppier elements, something our current crop of lefties, totalitarian as they may be in principle, probably lack the stomach or the weaponry for.