UNCIVIL WAR

The street violence in France is a war between students, the employed and unemployed on one side and the unemployable on the other:

With her pink-and-orange hair and pierced lower lip, Manuella Pereira considers herself a rebel standing up for fellow young people across France.

But the diminutive 17-year-old from a well-to-do suburb learned a harsh lesson about solidarity when she went to Paris last week to join a student march on the majestic esplanade of the Invalides military monument.

"A friend of mine got robbed and I got tear-gassed," said Pereira, a student at Albert Schweitzer High School in Le Raincy. In scenes recorded by television cameras, swarms of hooded, masked youths infiltrated the march Thursday in an upscale tourist district in the heart of Paris, beating and stomping the marchers, stealing their cellphones and money, and torching cars.

"On one side, the cars burning, and on the other, people with their families marching peacefully," Pereira said. "The [vandals] don't care about their future. They just want to perpetrate violence no matter what."

"The same [troublemakers] as in November are reappearing, but this time in broad daylight," Deputy Mayor Jean-Christophe Lagarde of Drancy, a town just north of Paris, said in the newspaper Le Parisien.

The mayhem shatters any illusions about unity among France's young people. In fact, gangs who disrupt marches and attack the protesters often feel contempt for students, whom they see as privileged and weak rich kids, a police intelligence commander said.

It's the same in Sweden:

“THE BOYS FROM ONE of the schools told me smiling how 'there is a wonderful feeling in the body when you are robbing, you feel satisfied and happy, it feels as if you have succeeded.'”

The interviewed boys are between 15 and 17 years old and one of them explained for Petra Åkesson what power means to him.

“To me it is that the Swedes lay down on the ground and kiss my feet.”

“The young muggers get a kick out of performing deviant and risky actions and they talk a lot about how easy it is to rob Swedes. And the kick gets even stronger when they are aware that the robberies are so easy to accomplish. 'It's so easy to rob Swedes, so easy', said one of the boys.”

THE YOUNG ROBBERS don't plan their crimes.

“No, when we see some Swedes who seem to be wealthy or as if they have expensive cellulars, we rob them.”

During the interviews the youths talked about Swedes as wimpy, scared and stupid.

“Swedes don't do anything, they just give us the stuff, they are so wimpy.”

“The youths don't plan or organize their criminal activities and are therefore not approaching it on businesslike terms,” says Petra Åkesson. “Their actions are instead distinguished by their view of the robberies as a lifestyle.”

The technical term for this is "mindless violence".