[rad-green] Yellow Vests & brass necks: How the brutality in France continues to be invisible

*http://www.defenddemocracy.press/yellow-vests-brass-necks-how-the-brutality-in-france-continues-to-be-invisible/
<http://www.defenddemocracy.press/yellow-vests-brass-necks-how-the-brutality-in-france-continues-to-be-invisible/>Defend
Democracy Press          19/12/2019*

*Yellow Vests & brass necks: How the brutality in France continues to be
invisible*

*Mass movements of working people met with extreme violence by the French
state and its achingly liberal President Macron has been ignored by Western
print and broadcast journalists with studied arrogance.*

*By George Galloway*
[image: image.png]

Though they wear high-vis, French protesters have been all but invisible in
the so-called mainstream media, also provoking deafening silence from the
labor and trade union movement, and even the so-called ‘left’ within it.

While a broken head or even a broken window in Hong Kong or Venezuela can
and often does lead the news, more than a year of weekly upheaval, mass
movements of working people met with extreme violence by the French state
and its achingly liberal President Macron has been ignored by Western print
and broadcast journalists with studied arrogance.

There can be no rational justification for this. Hong Kong is almost 6,000
miles (9,656km) from England, Caracas almost 5,000 (8,047km). France is 31
miles (50km) away. It’s not cheap to send and maintain news crews at the
other ends of the earth. Cheap awaydays proliferate to Paris.

No news judgement could possibly justify the almost complete absence of
coverage of widespread disorder amid massive crowds in our nearest European
neighbor over an entire year. Indeed, such is the antipathy between the
English elite and the French (and vice versa), to borrow a German word, one
might have expected a sense of schadenfreude to drive British coverage, in
top gear! But not a bit of it.

So much for the Yellow Vests. Of course, what has now happened is that the
entire organized working class of France has taken to the battlefield.
Great unions – like the moderate CFDT as well as the militant CGT – with
millions of members are now physically confronting the power of the French
state.

The proximate cause of this new development is Macron’s pension “reforms.”
Nowadays, reforms are bad things, whereas in former times they were good
things – essentially making French workers work longer for less pension
upon retirement.

But as with the Yellow Vests – whose original casus belli was a tax on fuel
– this is about far more than pensions now.

The French working class are sick and tired of austerity, sick of the
corruption and excess of the peacock throne of President Macron, sick of
the EU, sick of the whole political class. Precisely the formula which
drove the Brexit victory on our side of La Manche.

Traditionally the French – predisposed over centuries to revolution – are
far from sedate soft-shoe shufflers on protests. Conversely, the French
“riot police” take no prisoners. An irresistible force meeting an immovable
object.

But it is one thing the police battering students or even ordinary workers.
It is another thing to see the police wading into firefighters in full gear
– protective gear – as has been happening these last two weeks. No one has
seen two uniformed disciplined services knock seven bells out of each other
on the streets of Paris since, well, since forever.

The crisis appears to be spiraling out of the control of the French state;
Christmas could literally have to be canceled. Tourism has been hit hard, I
personally know three couples who have canceled romantic Christmas breaks
in the French capital. Air, bus, and train travel threatens to grind to a
halt. One would be less surprised to wake up to the news that the National
Assembly had been sacked than Louis Bourbon was to learn of the storming of
the Bastille.

Given the almost existential challenge being mounted against one of the
EU’s twin pillars, one can begin to understand the near universal silence
in Western capitals – not least their fear of the power of example.

But why the silence on the “left”?

Partly it is a sense of shame that the French workers are putting up the
kind of fight they wouldn’t even dream of contemplating. But partly it is
the absence of liberalism among the massed ranks of French workers. They
have cast away with disdain the identity politics which so infests what
passes for the left in most Western countries.

This not about gay rights, about black emancipation, about gender-neutral
right-on fads. This is not about asylum seekers or against racism in
defense of immigrants or about Bolivia or Venezuela or against France’s
dismal colonial record or current French wars in Africa. This is about the
French working-class confronting the capitalist system, head-on, and with
real red blood in the streets. French workers black and (overwhelmingly)
white, gay and (overwhelmingly) straight, men and women, self-identifying
only as workers tired of being robbed. It’s all a little too… proletarian
for what has become of the “left.”

And so like Nelson before them at the Battle of Copenhagen, they raise the
telescope to the blind eye and declare “*I see no ships*.” The left sees
not the French men o’ war, but the French workers can see them. And it is
not a belle vue.

** George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30
years. He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a
film-maker, writer and a renowned orator.*

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