The scum hour

He knew what it was like. He was born into a family of gangsters. His father was the head of a network of drug dealers, his older brother had just been released from prison, incarcerated for armed robbery. He himself, at sixteen, was "well known to the police..." Kevin was inhabited by hatred. Violent, ready for all excesses, he had been in a criminal spiral for years. Each act of delinquency, each arrest by the police, each court judgment, accumulated to seal his fate. Kevin, born into a Comorian family in Marseille, living in the Campanules housing estate, in a working-class neighborhood in the grip of chaos, was not aware of the origin of the events he was living through. Beyond the responsibility for his actions, which he assumed all the more because the judges for children had taken the trouble to systematically excuse his behavior, he understood that French society was cowardly and hypocritical. The judges had been giving him excuses for years because of his deleterious family environment, because of the supposed suffering of having a disabled mother, because of the color of his skin, in the end. In the background, he was forgiven everything because he belonged to an immigrant population that embodied the new people of the damned of the earth. Kevin was intelligent enough to understand that the indulgence of all these white bourgeois, in love with the "progressive" ideas of a declining race, was only hypocrisy mixed with a new type of racism. White people fantasized about bad boys like him. The president, a homosexual and cocaine addict, loved to touch young black men. White teenage girls in Beaumont thought they were liberated by dating him. Kevin played on all of this. The little white bitches who were looking for a hookup ended up violently soiled and beaten. Under the shock of the reality, they were thrown in pasture to the other members of Kevin's gang.

He was not able to understand that, well above the mediocrity of his neighborhood and his city, French society, and even Western society, was now entirely under the control of a globalized hyper-class that was destroying the model of an era. The immigrants were weapons of destruction. Before them, there had been the possibility for the Western working classes to prosper, until they could experience the relative comfort of the middle classes. The few old white people who still lived in the city of bellflowers spoke of a time when there were not "all these foreigners. They whispered about a time when the city of Campanulas was "clean" and inhabited by "normal" people. These proletarian racists spoke of the neighborhood schools where their kids had gone, where "something" was learned. They talked with pride about their kids who had benefited, who had become business managers, accountants or store managers. All the white kids who had succeeded had gone far from the Campanules, far from Marseille, far from people like Kevin.

The young man was, indeed, an intruder in this world that did not like him. In his suffering and frustration, he had systematically disappointed all the school teachers and social workers who had tried to help him. He got high on every substance he could find. He stole, raped, and caused as much damage as he could. Driven by hatred and despair, he had voluntarily enrolled in the school of evil. Somehow he wanted a different fate, but his hatred and the pleasure of destroying this white world won out. Often he would cry, then laugh like a madman the next moment. The psychiatric problems of the inner city population were, unfortunately, well known. Evil spirits loved to torment these unfortunate people.

So when the other asshole had been murdered and the unrest in Paris had begun, Kevin was ready. As soon as the riots had started, he had seen the faces of the French people in the neighborhood break down. The radio and television reported scenes of violence in Paris and other cities in France. There were scenes of looting, of white motorists being pulled out of their cars and lynched by brown youths. There were burning neighborhoods and armed clashes with overwhelmed police. Journalists had been lynched by the rioters.

Now the white people in Kevin's neighborhood were afraid. It was time. With his buddies, Kevin had gone out armed. They had "visited" all the neighbors who had opposed the gang's criminal ambitions. That night, several people had been tortured, raped or killed. Many, the majority, of Kevin's victims were from immigrant backgrounds. These people had simply wanted a peaceful life for themselves and their children.

Kevin and his comrades had looted stores in the Valentine's shopping center. They were laughing and shooting at people who were running away. They had raped so many girls that in the end, they just beat them up. Drunk on alcohol and drugs, they were settling scores with a country that had rejected them. 

At first they were surprised that there were no police. So they went to the police station to get cops to confront them. But the police stations of Kaddouz and Saint-Marcel were closed. The policemen, worried about the situation, had not come to work, preferring to keep their service weapon to protect their families. Kevin and his friends had therefore set fire to the premises. Sure of their impunity, they had ravaged the neighborhood for days, stopping only at the limits of the competing gangs.

Kevin and all the city's riffraff had been the masters of Marseille for weeks. Every day had been spent raping, looting, getting drunk and drugged. Sleep, when it was possible, was like a worrying coma. 

One morning, while Kevin was resting, in a state of syncope, in a villa that he and his friends had occupied a few days earlier, the soldiers of the Islamic army, who had arrived the day before at La Seyne-sur-Mer, had entered through the door that had been left ajar. They had discovered Kevin and his fellow men sleeping naked in a room littered with bottles of alcohol and drugs. The newcomers were warriors of Islam, educated in moral principles that Kevin and his ilk had never known. In the tradition of occupying armies, these soldiers of the Islamic army methodically eliminated the offenders they caught. Kevin and his friends, considered as depraved, had been dragged to the parking lot of the Casino des Caillols. There, tied up, their hands and sex were cut off, with Nasheed's death songs playing over the loudspeakers. Those who had thrown insults, had been tortured for a long time. Their tongues had been ripped out, they had been dismembered before being garroted. Kevin, who had always been a loudmouth, had slowly and painfully agonized in a huge pool of blood. 

These appalling events had taken place some time before the city of Marseille was flooded by the great Mediterranean tsunami.