France Aflame: Cowardice or Violence

In 1969, labor organizer César Chávez wrote:
We advocate militant nonviolence as our means for social revolution and to achieve justice for our people, but we are not blind or deaf to the desperate and moody winds of human frustration, impatience and rage that blow among us. Gandhi himself admitted that if his only choice were cowardice or violence, he would choose violence. "Men are not angels, and time and tide wait for no man."
I never knew much about France, except that the French are assholes, and depressed all the time. At least this is what people say, though when I was there (briefly) in '91 they treated me well. Unlike the Italians who treated us like shit despite our last name.
But I always try to understand the roots of mayhem, the reason for it; and it's clear that once again, Europe is paying for it's colonial past, just like England has in Northern Ireland. Though the 2 conflicts are different in their manifestations today, they have the same colonial root. Robert Fisk, from the London Independent, who is the Middle East correspondent for same has this to say about who it is that are rioting and the hx thereof:

"it's impossible to see the crisis in Algeria today, the crisis in France today, without going back to the War of Independence, which lasted from between 1954 and 1962, which eventually gave Algeria not freedom in the democratic sense, but freedom from imperialism, from colonialism. And you've got to realize that the wounds of that war were never healed. The Algerians who fought for the French, the Harki, were never forgiven by the Algerian government or people, the pieds-noirs, the vast number of French colonial people who lived in Algeria, who regard it as their home, whose parents and grandparents were born there. By the way, you keep calling it a French colony. The French, of course, regard it as “France metropolitaine.” It was part of metropolitan France, but the Algerian “natives,” quote/unquote, didn't have equal rights. The pieds-noirs have never forgiven the Algerians for throwing them out, effectively, of the country.
And one of the things we're not actually talking about now, but which we should be, is that many of the areas where this violence is taking place around Paris and other large French cities are areas where lower middle class French people who were pieds-noirs from Algeria now live. So what we actually have is we have Algerian youths setting fire to cars outside the homes of the people who were expelled from Algeria in 1962. You need to realize that it is, in this sense, there’s a civil conflict going on here, not just a minority objecting to their treatment by the country which is supposed to be their country now, their citizenship.
And what happened, of course, during that war was that the wounds were never healed, since no one wanted to heal them. What we had was a French government that, first of all, said, ‘We will never leave Algeria; it’s part of France,’ then negotiated with those who wanted freedom, and then, having done this negotiation, effectively ratted on their own French citizens and let them leave in penury and squalor on ships back to France, where in many cases they had no family and no friends. So in a sense this is a continuation.."
Robert Fisk is an arrogant asshole himself but damn, nobody knows about the Middle East like he does. Lives in Lebanon now and is an unimbed in Iraq frequenlty with horrifying tales to tell. Stuff you'll never hear about on Fox or CNN.