france is headed for self destruction just not as fast as north america is.
Only the Struggle Matters
LET GO LUKE!
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Our worth is determined, the painter attempts to show us, not by what we do in life, but by what we do with what life gives us. It is the ferocity and steadfastness of the struggle that exalt us, especially when we comprehend that victory is ultimately impossible. This wisdom would be echoed by
Albert Camus almost a century after Delacroix when he wrote that life required us to
“être à la hauteur de son désespoir”—rise up to the level of our despair.
Three Saturdays ago France experienced its 18th consecutive weekend protest by the
gilets jaunes, or “yellow vests,” against President Emmanuel Macron’s austerity measures, tax cuts for the wealthy and privatization of public services. Members of the masked and violent
Black Bloc had infiltrated the yellow-vest protest on the Champs-Élysées. A few dozen Black Bloc people smashed windows of luxury shops and torched Le Fouquet, one of the city’s best-known restaurants.
Police, who inexplicably waited to intervene, eventually used rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons to disperse the protesters. The images of the clashes and property destruction were repeatedly broadcast throughout the following week. The police chief would be fired. Macron, who during the mayhem was skiing in the Pyrenees, would ban protests on the Champs-Élysées and order 6,000 counter-terrorism soldiers deployed outside government buildings. The pleadings by yellow-vest organizers for Black Bloc activists to separate themselves from the nonviolent protests were effectively drowned out by the state’s successful demonization—bolstered by the broadcast media—of the protest movement as a threat to public order and security.
France has been in an official state of emergency since the
2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. The current crisis has only increased the presence of squads of heavily armed soldiers patrolling the city. The threat of terrorism, whether from radical jihadists or cliques of Black Bloc activists, i
s used by France and other states that seek to crush basic civil liberties and dissent in the name of national security. Macron, who is deaf to the plight of the working class and serves as a French instrument for the global social inequality orchestrated by corporate elites, is pushing significant sectors of the population off the streets and into the arms of the
neofascist Marine Le Pen, with whom our corporate masters can make an accommodation, just as they have with Donald Trump. What they fear is a popular uprising. What they fear is losing power. If it takes alliances with repugnant neofascists and demagogues to retain control they will make them."