by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog
Let’s predict the likely trajectory of France’s Yellow Vest movement:
What seems certain is that the only-on-Saturday protests will soon change into massive, permanent encampments in Paris, along the Champs-Elysées and Eiffel Tower. Other camps will be set up around the country, also at symbols of state power: the local city halls and tourist/historic attractions. This will make international news, because they will make for pretty pictures, but it’s the camps at road roundabouts and highway tollbooths which will make the necessary impact – an economic impact.
The primary call will be for the resignation of President Emmanuel Macron and new elections, because there is no other apparent socio-political solution to France’s problems:
A general strike has repeatedly failed to materialise despite years of hopes, and this has revealed the inability of French unions to reflect the will of the people. Unions have lost influence due to the four-decade official and legal assault on their overall numbers and militancy, but the Yellow Vests refusal to march alongside unions shows that they have grasped the seeming illogical premise underpinning Europe’s model of “independent” trade unions – that they would put the needs of the country over the needs of their dues-paying members. This social-labor-management blockage is also combined with total political blockage – i.e., the failure of France’s three mainstream parties (Socialists, conservatives, Macron’s new party) to provide a dependable political pathway for the political will to be expressed (much less implemented). Macron must go, not because he is so terrible (but he is), but because he is not “different”, which is what he implicitly promised by sweeping out the two mainstream parties.
A host of other demands will be officially adopted by the Yellow Vests; few of them will have ever been implemented in any major Western country. Macron will refuse, Brussels will make threats and defend Macron, and the battle lines will be drawn.
The strain of repeated clashes already has France’s detested police force “at the breaking point”, so they will use a shock-and-awe violence to disperse the camps quickly. Cops on horseback will ride roughshod over the protesters as though they were Black & Muslim refugees in France and not actual people. However, this won’t last long – the French People, habituated to constant police brutality at political protests, will continue to endure and fight back. This will encourage the international press to book long-term rooms in France, and the crucial moment will come when the cops breaks ranks and go over to the People.
Macron will then be faced with calling in the army, which in France is – as the French are – an extremely cliquish and walled-off group. Even though they are drawn from the People, their military’s extreme re-socialisation makes their commitment to the French People – as opposed to non-human French institutions – tough to gauge. I predict they will remain aloof – i.e., the French fall-back pose of social superiority – and will not save Macron, whom they never liked. Abruptly, Macron will be forced to step down, surprising everybody.
Nobody will know what to do next, and the economy will tank. The European Union, slowed additionally by Brexit, will grind to a halt. The Eurozone, the world’s largest macro-economy and still the global economy’s weakest major link, will enter a crisis even worse than in 2012…but France will be focused on themselves (another popular fall-back pose).
Several years of Cultural Revolution will ensue, creating entirely new institutions on both a national and pan-European level. I will be elected to a very high post despite not being a citizen of France, which will prove how “comrade-friendly” and socialist-inspired the Yellow Vest Revolution truly is. Since we are dreaming, I will also win the lottery, despite never buying a ticket. I will finally marry a nice, brown-eyed girl – she is also a supermodel who holds multiple doctorates in diverse fields, was a recent winner of the TV show “Top Chef”, hails from a family without problems of any sort to annoy me, and she will also never make me do housework or change a diaper.
Ok, the last paragraph is obviously absurd, but everything up to “Cultural Revolution” is very possible. After all, I pretty much described the situation in Egypt in 2011 – human history repeats itself, whether in Muslim or Christian/atheist lands.
I’ve been reporting in France for 10 years come February, and I was also at Tahrir Square when Mubarak fell, so I know how it happened. I arrived just after the cop-mounted camels (not horses) charged, and I was there the night when news of Mubarak’s departure provoked firstly a short wave of an unexplained cry, and then an ocean of celebration.
Thirty years of Mubarak versus 10 years of high Brussels and high-finance-imposed austerity – lotta difficult times for the average person. I certainly have grounds for such comparisons.
In my blueprint for a Yellow Vest Revolution the only real difference with Egypt is when I imagined that French cops would switch sides: In Egypt it was the army which stepped in to save the People, revoking the power of the hated, black-vested police forces.
I have heard and read from top rightish-but-leftish French sources, like Alain Soral, that the French police will save the Gilet Jaunes…which is nonsense. The West’s hysterical post 9/11 love affair with “First Responders” (excepting journalists, of course) is all a media concoction to hide this fact: the police are drawn from the most reactionary elements of society – they never go over to the crowd. In fact, they took their job in order to fight and manipulate the crowd. Admirers of French riot police fail to realize that cops are always selected from among the most class-illiterate, most intellectual brutal members of a society. The Egyptian army, by contrast, was broadly drawn from the mass of the People, and that is why the protesters at Tahrir repeatedly told me that they would never open fire.
Of course the Egyptian Army – in collusion with the sabotaging Egyptian 1% and foreign powers in Tel Aviv, Washington and the West – would later turn against the Egyptian People. The reason? The Egyptian People installed Mohamed Morsi and a Muslim democratic party via long-withheld Muslim democracy, and that will always threatened the Zionist project, the Egyptian 1% and regional Muslim monarchies. But in 2011 hopes were high, and rightly so.
Reactionary hopes that the Yellow Vests are done shows ignorance of modern French history
So is this the start of a French Spring? Will it spread to the Eurozone? To turn a 2011 cliche on its ear: Is the European World finally “ready for democracy”?
In my humble opinion: France is not there yet.
What preceded victory in Egypt was not anger, testosterone or the desire for fighting: the endlessly repeated word at citizen checkpoints was “ehsan” – which colloquially means “easy” or “calm”, but which is actually an Islamic concept meaning “act as correctly as if God were seeing you and you were also seeing God”. Indeed: who is going to commit a crime when they see God right in front of them? Makes it hard to get away with anything….
The Yellow Vesters do not act with such faith and peace, but that is not a condemnation of their spraying graffiti on the Arc de Triomphe – that was awesome, and incredibly effective in grabbing attention. But until we see even one permanent camp, let’s scrap my Egypt model for France.
But if France is not “ready for democracy”, I think that they are indeed ready to try.
This is what many pundits likely can’t tell you, because they don’t actually cover protests (unless they are about gay marriage, or against the Catholic Church, or other fake-leftist nonsense): we should be very, very stunned that the always-undercounting Interior Ministry said 34,000 French protested as late as December 15 and that 50,000 people protested on January 5 – that is totally unprecedented in the Age of Austerity. I’ve never seen anything close to that over the Christmas holidays, and the same goes for August – both are traditional times of vacation.
In a more-extensive article I wrote last month which explained the Yellow Vest movement in the correct context – as part of a “continuum” (8 years of (accumulative) state austerity) instead of the Mainstream Media’s isolated “vacuum” (“It’s just the diesel gas tax hike, we swear!”) – I predicted the movement would take Christmas off…and they did, but only relatively speaking – the first few Yellow Vest protests had 2-300,000 people.
But if we are looking at this like social scientists or experienced journalists, then we have to realize that our needle has actually jacked into the red because such political turnout from December 15 – January 5 is totally unprecedented over this time period. France has had 8 years of huge, constant anti-government protests (galvanizing 10 times more people than the biggest Yellow Vest protest), but we have never, ever seen such political activity during Christmas (or August) in the last decade. France has always traded vacations for political momentum…but not the Yellow Vests.
A lot of people in the media and in France are asking: Has the Yellow Vest movement died out? If you accept the logic of the above paragraph, the answer is: not at all, and we should get ready for something big.
However, the Mainstream Media wants to fool us because they over-emphasize the (obviously capitalist-influenced) statistics of overall turnout and “protest growth rate”. Their foolishness is ignorant and lacks context, but they do (sadly) set the tone of discussion. Ignore their foolishness – expect hundreds of thousands of Yellow Vesters back in the streets by the end of the month.
The Yellow Vests can’t die, because they have nowhere else to go
A lot of people have indeed put politics aside for Christmas, if only to get along with their family, but everyone in France will soon remember three crucial things: nobody has listened to the will of the French People in years; the French People have smashed/are smashing the mainstream political parties (Socialists, conservatives, Macron’s party); and, consequently, a new party simply must be formed due to this very real, very undeniable vacuum of undemocracy which is French politics in January 2018 (and which hit high gear in 2012 with Hollande’s backtracking on ending austerity).
Here is the crux of the biscuit, politically: Macron’s party was created and elected to destroy the two mainstream parties. It did. But Macron’s party is still an undeniable failure in the eyes of the French people – this is mainly because it was always fabrication of the 1% and not a genuine “populist” movement. Y’all were crazy to vote for a neoliberal, EU-loving Rothschild banker who married his statutory rapist (because I’m a classy guy I did not detail Macron’s obvious similarities with rock-and-roll co-founder Ike Turner until after the 2017 election), but Macron was fabricated because Marine Le Pen imperiled the fortunes and Quantitative Easing of France’s pro-globalisation 1%.
But when the destroyer of the destroying is destroyed, what is left? Answer: not much.
As I wrote in last month’s article, a Red-Brown alliance (the true left of the Communist-inspired, meaning people like Jean-Luc Melenchon and his party; the often-fascist National Front of the Le Pens) is not at all likely in France. After all, they foolishly elected a Rothschild banker expressly because they could not make this temporary partnership of necessity. Not even a shotgun could get this wedding consummated. As I wrote last month: Melenchon and Le Pen are simply too polarizing and have too much negative history to ever unite the two groups.
So, all five of France’s major political pathways – Socialists, Les Républicains of Sarkozy, Macron’s new Party, National Front (now Rassemblement Nationale) and France Insoumise (Melenchon’s party) – are unacceptable to and unwanted by the Yellow Vests.
That’s why I think the future of the Yellow Vests is to become a French version of Italy’s Five Star movement, but that’s a whole ‘nother article.
2019 prediction: A Yellow Vest standoff with Macron is certain
Macron’s first cabinet meeting of 2019 revealed that, sadly, he was not visited by ghosts on Christmas Eve like Ebenezer Scrooge telling “ministers they should be more radical in their attempt to reform the country and law and order must be restored” is proof of that. Translation: Macron is not going to slow down his pace of radical social “reforms” (unemployment insurance and social security are next on the docket) no matter how unpopular he gets, or how many protesters get in his way.
And why should he? I can’t stress this enough: yeah, over 1,000 protester arrests on December 8 was a record in my time, but I have seen countless days of hundreds of protester arrests over the past 10 years in France. Macron has truly grown up with this being considered “normal” governance, so why would he deviate from it and call off the police dogs?
(We can blame this “normalized” state brutality on the UN, Amnesty International and other top NGOs, as they must have used up all their condemnatory breaths for when an anti-government protester was overcharged for coffee in Venezuela, Iran and China.)
And why should he part 2? Macron has an absolute majority in Parliament, and this is a bourgeois/West European democracy, so he doesn’t have to. France’s liberal democratic system sucks and is based in the 19th century, and they have to eat what they sow, which is bourgeois self-interest & contempt for public opinion instead of some tasty socialist-democracy cake.
The best France can hope for in 2019 is that Macron’s job title has changed:
At first, he was the 1%’s Golden Boy charged with implementing as many neoliberal reforms as fast as possible in order to roll back decades of advancements for workers – he succeeded. Now, given that his popularity is half that of Trump’s, he has a new charge: prevent total revolution/instability by giving back as few morsels as possible, which he has already done.
But of course Macron’s 13-minute address on December 10 was unlucky – his main offer, 100 euros more to the monthly minimum wage, implicitly implied that he incorrectly views the Yellow Vests as merely the poorest of the poor – he doesn’t get it that 75% of France supports the movement because the Yellow Vests are middle class too. Austerity has accumulated to the point where a middle-class person in France has zero stability (what is this, the United States?!) I detailed last month how austerity has made what was once a comfortable salary in solid social safety net France – 2,000 euros – now quite precarious.
His other three offers also failed to even come class to appeasing the class-based anger against the 1%: no taxes on overtime (gee, thanks massa!); encouraging bosses to give Christmas bonuses out of the kindness of their hearts (so far I’ve counted a whopping total of two French media stories of bosses who have acquiesced, but the law gives them until March 31 to give a bonus or not); the cancellation of a tax on grandma and grandpa’s (already repeatedly frozen) pension (designed to win back the approval of France’s 16 million pensioners). All of that was doomed from the start, if the goal was to placate the movement; undoing 8 years of accumulated austerity measures will truly require something like a Cultural Revolution.
Given that Macron will not learn and desist, and given that trickle-down/austerity economics & social policies can only continue to their 40-year record of failing and creating misery – more intense confrontations are certain in 2019. That’s bad news for the former Golden Boy.
From a human standpoint, Macron can only fail if his task is not to inspire but to intimidate: Small, notably balding, waifish Macron can never look like a tough leader you wouldn’t dare defy, such as a father figure, a general, a tribal leader, or the grandfather of the nation (although Macron is a grandfather at 41).
Macron’s appeal was based on his claim to be a bold technocrat, and one who would sweep away the old order. Nineteen months later France’s economy is in the same stagnant shambles, and his “new order” is the old order at least 3/4ths of the country didn’t want and also on steroids.
Can Macron really push his public opinion-defying agenda for three more years and get away with it? Just getting through 2019 looks difficult.
But “Impeach!”, as the US proves with their similar calls, is simply scapegoating, media sensationalism, and not any remedy whatsoever to a Western nation’s deep structural problems caused by a rejection of socialist democracy.
So what is coming in France in 2019?
I am not a journalist who makes doomsday predictions to sell papers, but my answer is: major, major unrest. A protest during France’s vacation period: c’est pas possible! But it happened for the first time this century – it’s a little thing but it’s a big thing.
Bigger things appear certain when all the Yellow Vesters come back from vacation, and they will be joining a hardcore group of protesters for whom we have no recent parallel.
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television. He can be reached on Facebook.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/yellow-vest-protesters-call-huge-run-french-banks-60256694
Yellow vest activists are urging French citizens to empty their bank accounts and spark a massive run on French banks in their long-standing fight with the government.
Ahead of a ninth straight weekend of planned protests in Paris and across France, yellow vests are issuing calls on social media for massive cash withdrawals from banks.
Protesters hope the move will force the government to listen to their demands, notably their call for more direct democracy through the implementation of popular votes that allow citizens to propose new laws.
Activist Maxime Nicolle called it the “tax collector’s referendum.”
In a video message, Nicolle said “we are going to get our bread back … You’re making money with our dough, and we’re fed up.”
And they think the banks will actually hand over the people’s money?
Banks of course do not hold anywhere near the cash which would be equivalent to the amount that depositors have in their accounts.
This is called “fractional reserve banking”.
If this call is responded to, French people ( and indeed other European peoples ) will realise that the only folk who will see their money are those at the very front of the queue at the bank.
This sentiment in and of itself (panic) is more than enough to cause a run on the banks, bank closures and financial collapse especially since so much has been written about the insolvency of European banks.
https://mises.org/wire/eu-rotting-and-its-banks-are-insolvent
The countries of Europe and their populations have been absolutely looted by the banksters and this fact is now more and more coming to light. These brave protestors signify only the very beginning of the unravelling of the criminal financial system.
It cannot “stop” because as Ramin points out –
“The Yellow Vests can’t die, because they have nowhere else to go”
Another advantage to this tactic of withdrawing the money is that it enables millions of people to show support for the yellow vests without risking getting badly assaulted by the riot police.
We will have to see how this develops but I hope Ramin will write again about the developing crisis in France not least because the msm are doing all they can to ignore it.
Thanks Ramin.
This would surely make bank’s life difficult as they do not have the money to pay people back. But, rest assured that “tools” in the government will step in and ask for more “public debt” loans to keep the afloat. Welcome to Greek “public debt” scenario, where vast majority of Greece’s is nothing else but bail-outs of American and German banks. Someone sarcastically said that five major EU banks have only 1BLN euros in their vaults, the rest of their “wealth” is just “vaporware”.
In America at least, the ‘official’ numbers for a protest are always cut at least in half.
I saw this first hand once. I was helping as a citizen journalist at the protests against the torture school (known at one time as The School of the Americas) at Ft. Benning. I walked up to a group of journalists who were interviewing the Columbus police chief. Someone asked him how big the crowd was, and I heard the chief of police say 15,000.
I thought that was a bit low. I’d been up on the stage looking out at the crowd, and I’d have said 20,000. But 15,000 was close enough to be in the same ballpark when estimating a crowd in a street.
The next day, the AP and other American news reports gave the crowd size as 7,500.
To a numbers geek like me, that was a strange number. If you looked at a crowd and tried to estimate it and it was really about that size, you’d say that it was seven to eight thousand. But you wouldn’t specifically have said 7,500. However, 7,500 is exactly the number you get if you take the Chief of Police’s estimate of 15,000 and put it into a calculator and tell it to divide by 2.
I saw a couple of outliers the next day that took the AP’s number and again divided it by two. They had enough sense not to say the crowd was approximately 3,750, but those papers had stories that claimed the crowd was in the three or four thousand range. These are of course the obviously pro-torture American newspapers. And of course, if looking at the crowd from the back of the stage made me guess 20,000, the idea that it was only three or four thousand was fake news. But of course it wasn’t called fake news as the fake news was pro-military and pro-torture and against the priests and nuns who’d organized against American backed torture and repression in Central America.
The bottom line is not to believe ‘official’ numbers given in pro-government media about protest sizes.
Indiemedia,
I agree that one should always at least double the governmental counts of rallies.
However, mainstream media can often be even worse than the gov’t. Unless unions give a figure, most media just present the Interior Ministry’s number as truth. But the unions are certainly not at every protest in France. This is a problem, but the root is the servile attitude towards the government many media members have, instead of a more skeptical one. Over 10 years of reporting from France I have covered many hundreds of protests – 6-8 per month is not unusual for me – and I routinely see Mainstream Media drastically, drastically undercount protesters. It’s appalling.
It’s not a problem caused by going to print too early. There is a clear bias against anti-austerity protests (which can also be called “anti-government protests”), union-led protests and leftist-inspired protests, which all suffer the worst undercounting. This bias is also obvious in how the protests are presented, the refusal to use “intellectual” comments and only “emotional” comments from protesters, and the aggressive pictures which usually accompany leftist/union protests.
Ramin Mazaheri
I enjoyed reading your article. However, I have to disagree with your statement that Macrons political party was created to destroy the two mainstream parties. Well, not quite. It was created to prevent the election of Marine Le Pen and her National Front, to keep France inside the EU and to gratify the French elite. Honest and dishonet methods were used. Millions of votes were stolen from Le Pen. Her ballots were either transferred to Macron, or else her ballots were intentinally damaged, so they could not be counted. There is no question that the election was, at least, partially rigged. Le Pen openly stated that votes were stolen from her. However, after that she played it professionally, keeping a low profile and waiting for developments.
Did Macron really win the last election ? If he did, it was with a slight majority. Immediately after the election I knew that France had become a divided nation, a dangerous situation for the future. I also knew that current demonstrations would be inevitable. They can only enhance the popularity of Le Pen. As for Macron, I would be surprised if he finished his mandate as President. And after that ? As the old saying goes, when France cathes cold, the rest of Europe sneezes. Brussels will not be pleased.
You may be interested in Diana Johnstone’s article that points out that the destruction and defacements of property and monuments was primarily done by Antifa types.
https://www.unz.com/article/french-democracy-dead-or-alive/
The tagging of the Arc de Triomphe that you mention was primarily done by the anarchists which used their symbol as part of the tag.
The same undercounting occurred in Washington, DC, in the runup to the 2003 invation of Iraq.
At one protest in DC one could see mostly middle America: families, parents with strollers, grandfathers carrying a grandson on his shoulders, college students, etc. Yet all of the photos of the crowd showed freaky pictures of weird people. Just another way to marginalize genuine protest.
Katherine
If the Micron is forced to resign this will be the third defeat for Rothschild since Dr.Assad and Putin said “check” to NATZO in 2013.
Until the Yellow Vests start demanding that France regain control of its currency, then I’m putting it down as a directed movement — a controlled “revolution” that is aimless, which is the secret direction of its handlers. Nevermind the plethora of photoshopped protest images flooding the “interweb”, the fact that the movement has a colour should raise many eyebrows.
If you fall for something so obviously controlled, then there is no hope for real change. It is not about taxes nor democracy (both are fake debates) — it is about removing the financiers from power in culture, law and the economy.
“Let’s predict the likely trajectory of France’s Yellow Vest movement:”
You will need to ask the Masters of Discourse what is the purpose of their fake movement.
NB: if you are for mass migration into France then you’re part of the same problem.
To paraphrase the scene, “Behind these vests is an idea….and ideas are bullet proof”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l54ZSMQhRs
From the movie “V for Vendetta”.
The leader and his henchmen get their comeuppance. In the movie it was the British ruler but the same principle applies. The sooner people understand that they’re living in a dictatorship, the sooner there is a chance for real change. Will they?
“The yellow vests can’t die because they have nowhere else to go”
What is even more evident is that the French government has nowhere else to go!
The austerity measures / taxes were not created by Macron but were given to him to be implemented by the EU. The Yellow vests are in fact protesting against the EU (whether they realise it or not!) .
The French government cannot concede anything to the protesters, as this would unravel the entire EU budget. France is the cornerstone of the EU project, and the deep-state hammer will now hit very hard!
These protests have reached a dangerous point. The government cannot back down, and Yellow vests refuse to go quietly. What started as a peaceful march by a bunch of pensioners has evolved into a very serious social upheaval.
I read that french “philosopher” Luc Ferry who says the police should use live munition against the protesters…is this what it will come down to? Blood in the streets of Paris?
As for your comments about the police, I have seen several photos on twitter of “EU police”. So Macron has already invited foreigners to crackdown on the local French population. Suddenly it becomes clear what all those uneducated, male, military-age migrants who have been invited by Merkel and co. will be used for…
Speaking of French ’philosophers’, here’s what good ol’ BHL has to say on the subject:
”Ces pauvres qui disent qu’ils le sont et qu’ils n’en peuvent plus de l’être, quelle beaufitude, quelle grossièreté, quel manque de manière!”
(”Those paupers who say they are poor and have had enough — such naffness, such coarseness, such lack of manners!”)
With ’philosophers’ such as BHL and Luc Ferry, France does seem ripe for civil war indeed.
In december, at and around the Champs Elyssees, there were fully armed snipers on the roofs. Luckily they’ve not used their rifles. Until now the police have ‘only’ been using watercannons, teargas, and the 40mm rubber flashball, breaking some skulls, jaws and ribs, and destroying the eyesight of some protesters.
The yellow vests don’t represent any sort of movement at all. They have already disappeared from the streets in most communities. Winter sent them home.
I think they can be compared to the Occupy Wall Street (or whatever) in the states. A pretense of being a grassroots spontaneous uprising, but in fact totally staged with months of preparation and apparently tracing back to George Soros. Fake opposition with violent hooligans burning cars and breaking windows can be used to sweep a “get tough” candidate into power in the next elections, or justify repressive police powers.
B.S.
I’m a GJ and it’s mainly a grassroots happening. There are some people trying to pretend that they are representing the GJ, most of them are related to existing political parties, and these figures may have been Soros, NATO, EU or French intelligence injects. But the GJ have not been accepting any influence from, alignment or joining with any political parties or unions and have several times already punished people who pretended to represent them.
Some smart people among the GJ are developing ideas of how further, and most of them point primarily to the establishment of a so-called “RIC”, which stands for ‘Referendum d’Initiative Citoyenne’ or Referendum at Citizens Initiative. French laws will have to be changed for this and although most, if not all, political parties have promised a RIC in the past before elections, none of them has or would really like to implement them and thereby give true democratic power to the people.
If Macron will agree to install something like a RIC at all, he will likely try to limit the possible subjects of referendum as much as possible. The GJ realize this and will go back to the streets until they’ll have a full implementation of the RIC, a RIC ‘Universel’.
Vive les Gilets Jaunes, vive la France!
Jac
Jac,
You guys have my blessing and a wish for your success. Your road to success will get harder the more engendered Macron and his gang feels. All of the cowardly Europeans are watching you and hope for your success.
And btw, several of the ‘hooligans’ who turned peaceful demonstrations into chaos have been recognized by GJ as police employees. Some good journalism about the GJ and French government is done by RT. Look it up.
Totally agree. It is astonishing to see people who ought to know better falling over and over again for these enactments. With eyes and minds wide open _and the readiness to think independently and not follow the group_, it is obvious from the outset what;s going on. For example, from the very first moment of the AS in the Tunisia uprising; likewise “brexit”, likewise euromaidans. Will of the people my foot.
Very stimulating comment, thanx :(
Where do you get this conclusion from ?
Any protest is necessarily manipulated from the start ?
So what do you propose, start a “green vest” movement !?!
> http://lesgiletsjaunes.fr < Seems to be blocked outside of France. Use vpn situated in France. Info on this site is straight from the horses mouth.
This is what I get from Singapore when I try to access http://lesgiletsjaunes.fr:
Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access / on this server.
RM
This is a very insightful observation:
“The West’s hysterical post 9/11 love affair with “First Responders” (excepting journalists, of course) is all a media concoction to hide this fact: the police are drawn from the most reactionary elements of society – they never go over to the crowd. In fact, they took their job in order to fight and manipulate the crowd. Admirers of French riot police fail to realize that cops are always selected from among the most class-illiterate, most intellectual brutal members of a society.”
I agree with it completely and will add that in the usa, from personal experience, cops most often are from two basic groups. Those who were criminals as youths, who figured out that crime does pay much more safely and easily if one has a police badge. IE: system manipulators.
And those who were both deranged early on to worship authority and see themselves as essentially religious deciples enforcing the status unequal, heirarchical status quo.
I’m not buying the idea that Egypt had a big boost under Morsi, whose first Muslim Brotherhood instinct was the Islamo-fascist attempt to stack the Constitutional Assembly with salafist extremists, and take Egypt down the path to Wahhabist mediaevalism.
Every faction in Cairo is accused of being in bed with the Zionists: al-Sisi is said to have a Jewish mother. No: the MB simply proved what any observer since 1928 and Qutb himself could have known: they are fascists, subversives, implacably opposed to democracy. Morsi advocated the scrapping of food subsidies in line with his IMF friends, threatening the fellahin with starvation. He declared war on both the Syrian Arab Republic AND Ethiopia too, over water. Thank God for al-Sisi.
— Apart from my crank comments, interesting article. Just saying…
The IRA created mayhem in Northern Ireland. A few bombs in England – some of them false-flags. The wrong people were falsely accused imprisoned for lengthy periods. The Wikipedia says 3,500 lives and over 50,000 casualties. None of that worked. The Brits were an army in occupation with the full support from the paramilitaries of Protestant persuasion and the police.
As soon as the IRA changed tactics and started damaging traffic light control units around London’s busiest entry-points, the British government hastened to negotiate with them and we had the “Good Friday Agreement”. Of course, I am not suggesting that the “Gilets Jaunes” do the same thing. This is just a historic footnote. :)