Paris Riots

Well. Nobody likes the French for a start.

 

LOL.....



Cheers Glen.

 

We've had a few in the past

 

Because HF's Is An English Speaking Forum.............The French Are Of The Opinion That The World

Should Speak French........The Opinion Of The World Tends To Differ Somewhat From That.......



Cheers Glen.

 

About the #YellowVests movement: Any militant antifascist support is welcome


"The first day of action was on 17th November. There were 2.000 blockades all over France, a lot on the paying entrances of the motorways, at the entrances of some commercial centres, and in some refineries and ports. A lot of the people who take part in this movement are blocking and demonstrating for the first time in their life, this movement might be a lot of things but for sure not the “usual” French social movement.

During the week, a lot of GJ are working, so there are less blockades, but some places are permanently occupied and sometimes partially blocked since 3 weeks; mostly some round-abouts (it even happened that some people built up huts and say they will spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve there), but also some ports.

Despite that 65.000 cops were mobilised (who are basically nearly all the cops the French state can mobilise), the situation was totally out of control for the whole day in many places: Paris, Toulouse, Marseille, Dijon, Bordeaux, Le Pouzin, Tours, Le Puy En Velay. Those places have seen the biggest riots since at least 1968, many demonstrations, hard fights with the cops, burning barricades, sometimes looting. In many other cities, there were also clashes in smaller scale. Even some “prefets” (the regional chief of police who are legally not allowed to make that kind of statement) have contacted some journalists and declared that the situation is some kind of uprising, or even “a pre-revolutionnary moment”, and that the government doesn’t understand the situation at all.

We can point 2 really surprising aspects of this movement:

– According to the pools (we know, we usually don’t give a shit about these craps, but here it has an importance), more than 70% of the French people are supporting the movement. Even the hard clashes of the 1st December haven’t changed this rate of support. This is significant considering how the media speaks about the movement – sometimes it can be really funny to watch the news or to listen to the radio these days – and also about the way the government assesses the situation – Macron had to walk back for the first time, but it seems he did it too late and his concessions weren’t enough (we’ll speak about it later).

– One of the main problem of the government is that the people who are demonstrating and rioting feel they are legitimate to do it and are claiming what is theirs. A lot of them say they cannot take the way they are living, working full time and still being poor anymore. They think that it’s their right to protest, that it’s written in the constitution, and that there is no question whether a demo is authorized or not. So when the cops shoot tear gas and rubber bullets to them (like they use to do), the people get really mad, some shout at the cops that they pay their salary and that the cops should be ashamed of doing what they do, some are fighting them back hard – right now, a lot of images of cops violence (which went wild) are massively shared on the GJ Facebook accounts. Even if there are are some organised leftists and fascists groups in the riots, it seems that most of the rioters are “simple” citizens who are getting “radicalised” in a really short time."

 

Anti climate change tax?

 

Meh.......or

And I just throwing it out there....

No one gives a shit

 

Then why doesn't that same 70% get off their lazy asses and vote in a different government? There is no excuse for violent protests in a free country.

 

Because the governemnt has been failing them, some for years, others for decades. You think that would be obvious. Macron is a centrist... And this movement is significantly diverse politically. Ranging from fascist all the way to anarchist. Their disenfranchisment just reached a point they couldn't stand anymore. But as with what happens with most movements, some politician will probably co-opt it for their own personal gain.

Why should people who are creating power over their own lives go and give that power up to some rich politician with no common interest with the people?

But to shorten this reply, I'll just post some links to critiques of what you mentioned, being democracy and violence.

First: From Democracy to Freedom. Audio / Text





Second: How Nonviolence Protects the State

 

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

-Isaac Asimov

 

So instead of engaging in intelligent debate, we've digressed to quoting bumper stickers? But to keep poking a bit, which violence are you talking about; the state? The police?

"A riot is the language of the unheard"
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr

 

A prediction maybe?

 

Well Paris has burned many times. Most famously there was the Paris Commune and also the 1968 rebellion. But also many times over the last few years as well.

 

Who knew that burning automobiles would become an alternate heating source? The French of course!

 

what is really scarry is how apathetic Macron has been, first doing absolotuley nothing, then giving in to some of the protesters demands apperently thinking that would make them stop though anybody with half a brain cell could tell him the opposite will happen, then going back to doing nothing.

Macron = weak leadership

 

Macron lives to feeds the fat cats.

 

CrimethInc. : Contribution to the Rupture in Progress : A Translation from France on the Yellow Vest Movement

"One can always count on bureaucrats, professionals, or trainees, and on the army of organic intellectuals of emptiness, to play the ventriloquist, to play the grand game of the Party, to imagine themselves once more in the avant-garde of a movement, for which they are in reality just sad street sweepers bringing up the rear.

Here they are proposing watchwords, soon to be constitutions, enacting rules of good collective conduct, exhorting the inversion of the power struggle, rambling on learnedly about the pre-revolutionary characteristics of the situation, infiltrating protests and meetings, calling for the convergence of struggles… These practices, these speeches were already hollow incantations last year during the movements of the railway workers and the students—they are hollower than ever today. For the novelty, the tenacity of the first successes of the “yellow vests” cruelly illuminate the series of almost systematic defeats that have taken place over the past several years in France and the general decomposition into which all the currents of the left, so proud of their heritage and singularity and always so stupidly heroic in their posturing, have sunk little by little over half a century. Far from being an obstacle, it’s precisely the much-disparaged ideological impurity of the movement that has enabled it to spread and rendered obsolete all the unifying voluntarisms of specialized organizations and activists. To the professionals of the leftist order and the insurrectionary dis-order, the movement of “yellow vests” only offers an invitation to travel, to a participation that will finally be free of the established collectivities, like so many ideological and material weights of the past.


The mobilization underway has no need of being inflated—or rather, competed with, if one knows how to read between the lines of the deposed little chiefs’ revanchist declarations—by existing or parallel movements. In the roundabouts and in the streets, by blockade or by riot, it is already bringing together forces that are heterogeneous, politically diverse, or even opposed (though often sociologically close) to encounter and to clash. Instead of using preexisting ideas or shared class consciousness or even videos and messages exchanged on social networks, the movement clings to local sociability, old and commonplace, to interactions outside of the workplace, in the cafés, groups, sports clubs, buildings, neighborhoods. Because the religious character of progressive ideology, with its hackneyed myths and empty rituals, is completely foreign to them, the “yellow vests” don’t appear in the first two weeks of the movement to carry assurances or pat interpretations of their common misery. With suppleness and adaptation, at the risk of division and dissolution, they take to the streets, advance on crossroads and tollbooths without prejudice, without imposed certitude, free of the pathological intellectualism and idealism of the left and of leftists and their fantasy of the proletariat, the historical subject and the universal class.

The movement is situated at the turning point between two periods of capitalism and the modes of government associated with them. In its content more than in its form, it bears the marks of the past, but leaves glimpses of a possible future of struggles or uprisings. The critique of the tax, the demand for redistribution, the correction of inequalities—all these are addressed to a regulatory state that has largely disappeared.

Since it defies the parties and expresses itself outside of unions—and even, at the beginning, against them—the movement also confronts the entire system of representation of interests that dates from the Second World War and from the Fifth Republic: a set of mechanisms of delegation attached to the Keynesian administration of capitalism. In thus dismissing the left and leftists to ancient tradition, or better, to formaldehyde, the “yellow vests” complete for some the demands for autonomy that have been expressed since May 1968. But for the same reason, they are also in harmony with the program of destruction of union organizations and democratic institutions that has been implemented under advanced capitalism since the 1970s. Or rather, they are its irreducible remainder, the emergence of which some had prophesied. Keynesian, libertarian, and neoliberal by turns, or all at once, the movement brings with it, in its relationship to the state, the economy, and history, the stigmata of these dying political ideas and the ambivalences of our time.

Nevertheless, the movement proposes, albeit in a still paradoxical form, the first mass politicization of the ecological question in France. This is why one would be wrong to relate the mobilization only to the conditions of class, status, and profession, and to create an oversimplified opposition between the problems of the end of the month and the question of the end of the world. This old reflex is also a remnant of the old regime of regulation and protest. In the movement of the “yellow vests,” labor is not the epicenter any more than purchasing power really is. What the movement protests, beyond ecological injustices (the rich destroy much more of the planet than the poor, even while eating organic and sorting their trash, but the poor are the ones who must bear the costs of the “ecological transition”), is above all the enormous differences that exist in relation to circulation, which have hardly been politicized until now. Rather than expressing itself in the name of a social position, in this sense the movement makes mobility (and its different regimes: constrained or chosen, diffuse or concentrated) the principal focus of the mobilizations, and, in blocking traffic, the cardinal instrument of the conflict."

 

Nice of them to think of the horses' safety as well as their own.