French 'Right Wingers' Are Patrolling Lille's Subway for 'Scum'

Posted by: Frank Roman on: 04/25/2014 06:05 AM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

A long overdue solution. [Transpole having] full control has been to the detriment of the white French subway users’ security. The response time is too long and the mediation officers are useless. And of course the whiners are wetting their collective beds.

Last month, members of extreme right-wing group Génération Identitaire (GI) launched an “anti-scum security tour” in Lille’s subway system. Around 30 men in yellow raincoats gathered in the northern French town on the 14th and 25th of March to patrol the trains running on the Transpole network, apparently with the goal of imposing a “deterrent presence against thugs who attack and steal with impunity”.

A bunch of far-right activists marauding around an enclosed underground space in search of their definition of “scum” obviously doesn’t sound like a particularly good thing. So it’s understandable that a lot of people got pretty up in arms about the initiative – not least the French NGO Human Rights League, which released a statement claiming that the GI’s patrol was intended "to serve as a propaganda tool for their extreme right splinter ideas”. Transpole representatives also said that they were “deeply disapproving” of the GI action.

One problem with the GI's apparent goal is that there are already 450 officers and 3,600 security cameras active across the Transpole network, so it's unclear why any further deterrent is needed. However, one other potential motivation for the “anti-scum” campaign becomes apparent when you look at a recent survey conducted by local newspaper La Brique, which concluded that certain neighbourhoods in the city suffer from “an unemployment rate fluctuating between 30 and 40 percent”, while also housing “a large concentration of immigrants of mixed origins”.

If you’re a member of an extreme far-right group, seeing those two bits of information next to each other is presumably enough ammo for a whole album of spoken word hate speech. I wanted to know whether that was the actual reasoning behind the GI's "security tour", or whether they actually believed they were protecting people by standing around and intimidating subway passengers. So to find out I spoke to Aurélien Verhassel, head of Generation Identitaire in Flandres, Artois and Hainaut, three of Lille's most important historical areas.

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French 'Right Wingers' Are Patrolling Lille's Subway for 'Scum'