By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

I love reading the French radicals from both the left and the right and they intrigue me for largely the same reasons. For better or worse, from Louis Althusser to Alain de Benoist, they all fucking “go there.” Damn the torpedoes! With France still smoldering from the wildest riots in decades, “there” is the banlieues, the impoverished suburban ghettos that the latest wave of violence burst from after French police executed a teenager. The far left blames the violence on xenophobic oppression and the far right blames it on mass migration. My response is can’t it be both? The kids in the banlieues are the progeny of the refugees of French imperialism in Africa but they haven’t found peace and liberty in the first world, they have only found more colonialism. They have been severed from their cultures by globalism and given nothing but the modern banality of social media and video games to replace it. They burn the communities they live in because they don’t belong to them. They are lost and kumbaya integration isn’t going to save them, but neither is xenophobia. Their best hope is to follow in the footsteps of the Black Panthers and the Latin Kings. Embrace the banlieues not as part of France but as autonomous third world nations unto themselves and reject anything outside them as foreign intervention. People without a nation must become a nation and you don’t need a state to achieve this. If anybody can grasp this school of third world anarchism it should be the descendants of the Berber nomads who tamed the Sahara. The right is correct to point out that these kids are not French, and they never will be, but they are dead wrong if they believe that isn’t something to be proud of. All power to the banlieues.