Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: France Page 1 of 2

Macron & Many European Leaders Call For WWIII?

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On February 27, 2024

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So, French leader Macron thinks Europe should send troops to Ukraine to fight Russia. (This is colloquially known as “declaring war on Russia.”)

rench President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that sending Western troops to Ukraine should not be ruled out, as European leaders concluded a summit on supporting Kyiv.

“There is no consensus today to send ground troops officially but … nothing is ruled out,” Macron said at a press conference in Paris, where the meeting had just wrapped up. “We will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war.”

“The defeat of Russia is indispensable to the security and stability of Europe,” the French president added.

…

The subject was first raised publicly by Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who said a “restricted document” ahead of the summit had implied “that a number of NATO and EU member states were considering sending troops to Ukraine on a bilateral basis.”

…

Macron also announced that leaders agreed to set up a ninth capability coalition on deep strikes that will focus on medium- and long-range missiles. Other coalitions include artillery, air defense and de-mining.

This is, in effect, an acknowledgment that Europe knows Ukraine is losing.

So, there are two main possibilities here. First, it’s a negotiating ploy, to get a better deal for Ukraine. Second, they’re serious.

Let’s point out a couple things: Russia is outproducing the entire West in artillery shells and ammunition and Western armories are bare: they’ll run out in two weeks to a month of real war, at most. Second, China is not going to let Russia really lose a war, because they know who’s next and Europe has mostly been very willing to follow the US in anti-Chinese actions.

Iran, obviously, will support Russia as well. They know they’re on the list.

It’s actually not clear that the West would win this war: Russia is out-producing the West in terms of war materials, China is the undisputed largest industrial power in the world and it’s not clear that if other powers step in, China and maybe Iran won’t step in on Russia’s side. They really, really don’t want to: but the defeat of Russia, as already noted, is an existential threat to them.

Next, if either side starts losing, there will be a strong temptation to reach for the nukes.

On a smaller note, if Europe supplies long range missiles and those missiles hit something that matters (say the Kremlin, or the Bolshoi) things could get ugly fast. Seeking to expand the war further into Russia is certainly “legal” but it’s not wise. It won’t change the outcome of the war, it will merely make the war more likely to expand, which is why the German Scholz is correct to oppose it.

All my life, the charge against people outside elite circles has been that we are “un-serious”.

This is extremely un-serious behaviour.

I will note, further, that the reason Europe and the US can’t compete with China and Russia is that they simply refuse to reduce economic rents, lower living costs and make their rich less rich in order to reduce operating costs and oligopolies and monopolies sufficiently to ramp up production, both of war materials and, well, everything else.

They want to live like Kings, our elites, having the South send them materials and the Chinese and other nations send them manufactured goods, while using their populations for rent extraction so they can become richer and richer.

They have confused money with power. Money is only power when it can buy power. And increasingly, in the West, it can only buy power domestically, not internationally.

This is a grave mistake, and the graveyard of Empires.

Fools. And worse than fools.

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France Isn’t In A Civil War Yet, But It Is Close

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On July 4, 2023

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So, the main police unions in France put out this rather deranged statement:

Now that’s enough…

Facing these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, it must be imposed!

Restoring the republican order and putting the apprehended beyond the capacity to harm should be the only political signals to give.

In the face of such exactions, the police family must stand together.

Our colleagues, like the majority of citizens, can no longer bear the tyranny of these violent minorities.

The time is not for union action, but for combat against these “pests”. Surrendering, capitulating, and pleasing them by laying down arms are not the solutions in light of the gravity of the situation.

All means must be put in place to restore the rule of law as quickly as possible.

Once restored, we already know that we will relive this mess that we have been enduring for decades.

For these reasons, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA Police will take their responsibilities and warn the government from now on that at the end, we will be in action and without concrete measures for the legal protection of the Police, an appropriate penal response, significant means provided, the police will judge the extent of the consideration given.

Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the government will have to become aware of it.”

So. The bolded part is important: it’s a declaration that the police unions won’t obey the orders of the government if they don’t agree. This is something I’ve been expecting (and seeing) for a while. During the Trucker Convoy in Canada, the police refused to enforce the law and arrest the protestors. That’s why, in the end, the government froze the bank accounts of protestors, because they couldn’t get the cops to enforce the law against people they liked and agreed with.

The same sort of thing happens over and over in the US, where right wing protestors aren’t arrested, often even when they commit violence, but are protected by the police.

Now the riots in France are largely Muslim, though not entirely. The Muslim immigrants have been pushed into suburbs and left to rot, with no effective way to move up in society, and at the same time social services have been repeatedly cut and money has, in France, as in all neoliberal nations, been funneled to the top. This bleeding ulcer is old, about 50 years old, and everyone has noted that it was bound to cause problems. These aren’t the first riots, they’re just the worst.

France has had a lot of riots and protests over the past few years, notably related to Macron’s increase of the pension age and rules, which means that many people will have to work into their 70s. (Theoretically one can retire before then, but for most people, the pension will not be enough without more years of work.) Those protests and riots were mostly white.

One of the topic categories on this blog is “the age of war and revolution”. I put it up in 2000, to indicate what was to come.

The current riots will be defeated. They’re large, but not serious. The rioters are not marching on the government and government officials, which is what would be required to actually overthrow the government. It isn’t a civil war.

But the police indicating they won’t accept legal orders, not just by passive resistance (as in Canada) but in outright defiance of the government is a very dangerous sign. The usual requirements for a successful revolution are an elite faction in support, a popular protest and the defection of at least some of the enforcer class.

France is very close to meeting those requirements: part of the elite agrees with the cops, there is a right wing primarily white conservative populist movement and the police are now showing clear defiance.

So, France isn’t in a civil war yet, but it could be soon.

As for the left, this is a fulcrum point. They need to strike and strike hard as soon as possible, because France’s Fifth Republic appears to be on its last legs. If the right overthrows it, the left will be in exile for at least two generations. It’s the right or the left, and right now the right seems most likely.

More on this and the general situation soon.

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Is France Near A New Republic?

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On March 27, 2023

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This video is worth watching, though I have no idea whether the bit about dead cops is true:

The situation is simple: Macron unilaterally raised the pension age by two years from 62 to 64. This is after it was increased to 62 from 60 in 2010. He couldn’t get it past the legislature, so he used a clause which allows him to do so without legislative approval. Macron one the final round of the last election by 17%, but he had no mandate for this sort of reform. People voted for him to keep LaPen (the far right candidate) out.

This has caused an explosion of protests which is not abating.

A little more background is useful. The standard talking point is that France can’t afford the current pension system and thus MUST push back the qualification date and that this is reasonable because people have longer life spans than when the pension system was created and because the age pyramid has changed: there are proportionally fewer younger people and more older people.

Here’s the French GDP per capita char from 1980 to 2021:

So, it rose pretty consistently till about 2008 (surprise) and since then is flat to slightly rising depending.

Next chart. Labor productivity.

Same basic pattern.

One more, inequality.

That last table, in particular, deserves a good looking at if you have time.

But for current purposes, what is important is simply this: France is richer than it used to be and more productive and more of its income and wealth is held by the rich, and if France wants to keep its retirement age at 62 it can certainly afford to do so, it just might have to tax rich people a bit more and maybe not give billions to Ukraine and so on.

Of course France can afford an early retirement age of 62 or 60. It can only not afford it if you “hold everything equal” in the sense that you assume doing so is not a priority.

So, Macron is full of shit. The government can easily afford the current French pension age and should probably even drop the age a couple years if the majority of the population want that.

Meanwhile while what Macron has done is constitutional, it clearly shows that the constitution is broken: he’s doing something the majority of the population and the majority of the legislature oppose, which in a democratic society shouldn’t be possible.

Since he’s shown that the constitution itself is broken and that majority will cannot be accommodated because doing so would require the government to tax rich people who have been doing very well over the last forty odd years, French citizens are entirely justified to get out in the streets and not just stop this bill but overturn the Republic and institute the next one.

As for Macron, he’s always been insufferably sure that he’s right about everything (I am aware of the irony of me of all people writing this) and that it’s OK to make the majority of the population suffer to keep neoliberal orthodoxy running. He’s a true believer, a genuine ideologue, his ideology is just neoliberalism and neoliberalism doesn’t work any more.

France should be a model for more countries. When your rich people screw you over, take to the streets.

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Macron (Radical Neoliberal) vs. Le Pen (Reactionary Fascist) in France

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On April 11, 2022

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So, this is probably the best commentary on why it’s close:

The current French retirement age is 62. Macron has said that, if re-elected, he will increase it to 65. Le Pen will decrease it to 60.

France has a run-off system. The top two candidates are pitted against each other in the second round. In the first round, results were approximately as follows:

Note that Jean-Luc Melenchon, the left-wing candidate, was less than three percent behind Le Pen.

Melenchon’s policies?

His manifesto includes lowering the age of retirement, hiking the minimum wage, and freezing food and fuel prices.

As a public denouncer of the free-market economy, Mr. Melenchon advocates “state intervention in the economy” to spread wealth, guaranteeing what he calls a “dignified life for all workers.” He told a campaign rally in Paris he would heavily tax the wealthy.

…

Mr. Melenchon said: “The free market, as you see, is chaos. Another world is possible.”

If he takes office, Mr. Melenchon hopes to pass a “social emergency law” as soon as possible, which would increase the minimum wage to €1,400 per month (from €1,269.03 at present) and cap salary differences between workers and CEOs at one to 20.

He pledged to enforce greater controls on the movement of capital, and guaranteed jobs for the long-term unemployed.

He also announced plans to give 800,000 public sector workers on temporary contracts a permanent tenure – as well as plans to prevent top companies listed on the French stock exchange from paying dividends.

He wants to lower the retirement age in France from 62 to 60, unlike Mr. Macron who currently wants to raise it to 65 to “balance the pension bill.”

As a keen proponent of mass wealth redistribution, Mr. Melenchon also wants to boost the capital gains tax up to the same level as income tax and introduce a progressive corporate tax, as well as seize inheritances greater than €12 million.

That’s a very left-wing program in the current context.

Meanwhile, as John Nichols points out:

If supporters of the French Socialist, Communist, Trotskyist, and Green parties had backed left-wing presidential candidate Melenchon, he would not merely have beaten Le Pen. Melanchon would have finished in first place, ahead of Macron.

So, because the left won’t cooperate with each other, they have wasted a good chance of a real-left wing government, and the French are now forced to choose between a nativist fascist (who, among other things, would not allow single women to have in vitro fertilizations), and an arch-neoliberal who wants to make everyone but the rich poorer.

Neoliberals have wanted to cut pensions for ages (true also in the US and almost everywhere else), so Macron is making the bet that people will hold their noses and vote for him, rather than for Le Pen. But the swing is five years; if Macron wins, you retire at 65, while if LaPen wins you retire at 60.

Strangely enough, old people prefer Macron, and young people prefer Le Pen:

Which is to say the strategy of forcing votes against the reactionary right-winger will work, until it doesn’t. Polls suggest it will work, again, this time, but polls have often been wrong in such close cases, and polls suggest it won’t keep working.

The Left will have one more chance to get its act together before the next election. It had best take that chance. Fortunately, Le Pen’s economic  policies are foolish and won’t entirely work (not because of the pension age, but because she still wants to make the rich, richer), but once reactionaries get in power, they tend to use their power to crush the Left.

France is one of the few places in the “developed” world where the Left still stands a good chance of getting into power. Once they do, if they run the economy well (which will be easy, because the world order which made it impossible is dying), then they can create generational change and lock in left-wing politics for 30 to 50 years.

If they don’t, however, the Right will set the new ideological terms.

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Delusion Regarding the Fall of Neoliberalism and Globalization

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On September 25, 2020

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So, the article below was published December 8th, 2015.

The pull quote is:

Neo-liberalism is nearing the end of its cycle. It will kill a lot of people dying, but its death is now ordained and can only be slowed by fanatical levels of police state repression in a few countries. And its death convulsions and the birth pangs of the new system will create a new age of war and revolution which will kill far more.

This is now as close to inevitable as human affairs, endlessly complicated and subject to unexpected shocks, can be.

Nothing has changed, the process has simply continued. Notice the repression going on in the US right now. Since I wrote it, the UK left the EU, there was massive resistance to Macron in France, and so on. We have massive fires all over the world: Australia, California, South Africa the Amazon and more. Wealth continues to concentrate at the top, etc, etc…

These convulsions take time. Slap the start of the actual fall as 2020, with the UK’s Brexit, and we’ve got 12 to 20 years to go. This one’s going to be bad, really, bad, simply because of climate change and our vast over-exploitation of limited resources. There’s going to be a lot of real hunger and lack of water, and so on.

The next age is undetermined, but one possibility is a centrifugal period. It is hard to imagine a future in which, India, for example, survives as a unified nation. For that matter, I’m not sure I’d put my money on China holding together over the middle run: 50/50 it’s fallen into warlordism by 2050 to 60.

The simple way to make your guesses is ask if a country can feed itself with domestic production AFTER the effects of climate change. If it can’t even feed itself now (or only barely); or if it is going to have serious water issues (water, obviously affects agriculture, so it’s not really two things), then the smart money is that it’s going to break up or lose effective control of various hinterlands.

And if you’ve got resources a more powerful nation on your border wants, well, that could go very badly for you. (My fellow Canadians, who seem clueless about how violent Americans are, should take note here.)

On the upside, this will be a very interesting period to be alive, if you can stay that way.

Natalie Nougayrède writes in the Guardian about The Front National’s victory in France:

Marine Le Pen has no solution for France’s problems, her economic programme is all about retreating from the outside world and Europe. Her social vision is of a mythical, homogeneous France that never existed. What she has to sell is an illusion. It’s only because so little else is on offer that people are buying.

This analysis is, there is no kinder way to put it, delusional.

And Nougayrède should know it, because she writes:

The impact of globalisation marked the end of what the French demographer Jean Fourastié coined Les Trente Glorieuses (The Glorious Thirty), the 1945-1975 period when France was modernising and increasing its international influence. There is much twisted nostalgia in the rise of the National Front.

Nougayrède blames this on the oil shocks, which the entire West failed to handle (note that Japan, far more vulnerable to the oil shock, DID handle it. Their later failure had other causes). She notes that France’s elites have not, since 1975, been able to turn things around, something I have noted as well.

But she is wrong about a retreat from globalization being delusional. The simple fact is that in France and almost every other country (including, by the way, most African countries), growth was better before globalization, and the proceeds of that growth were distributed to their populations much more evenly.

This is a fact, and you can only argue against it by invoking China (which used classic mercantalist policies, and was not meaningfully party to the 1945-1975 consensus economy.)

There will always be trade. There will always be global movement in goods, capital, and ideas, but more is not always better.  In fact, one can easily argue that more is rarely better.

As for “Europe,” the fact is that increased integration has not been to the benefit of most Western Europeans. That assertion is, again, extraordinarily hard to argue against and is especially true of the creation of the Euro.

Nougayrède wants France’s leaders to fix things, and not to fail, but she is very nearly as delusional as them. She admits that their failure has led to the rise of Front National, but cannot admit that their policies have failed, economically, along the lines that Marie Le Pen says they have.

Just because someone is a near-Fascist does not mean they are wrong about everything. I have no tolerance for LePen’s brand of Imperialism and cultural supremacy, but she, like Trump, is telling a lot of truths to a lot of people who feel like their country has been on the wrong track for a long time. (In the U.S., white, working class male salaries peaked in 1968. No matter how much you scream about white privilege, you are a fool if you expect white males to gravitate towards anyone who doesn’t at least pay lip service to reversing that.)

As an economic project, the EU is a failure for many of its members, including France. There are exceptions (Germany, Poland, etc.) but the losers cannot be expected to just sit there and take the beating forever. The “beating” has been exacerbated by Europe’s deliberate imposition of austerity. It is not just that Europe’s elites have failed to create a good economy, it is that they have deliberately made the economy worse for the majority of residents in many of its countries.

Until we can honestly evaluate the failures of neo-liberalism, and gut globalist cant which claims more trade and capital flows are always a good thing (and, even if they aren’t, are “inevitable”) we cannot fix the economy.

France, like about half of the EU, should leave the Euro. It should re-impose tariffs on a wide variety of goods and produce them in their own countries. Yes, they would cost more, but wages would be higher. It should also move radically to non-oil-based energy (as is true of, well, almost everyone).

These basic policies are not difficult. Corbyn is not wrong to say “make the necessary adjustments so it will work today, and go back to post-war policies.”  It failed,  yes, but it was the last economy which spread money evenly through the economy.  Make sure it’s not sexist and racist, update it for new energy technology, and try it. It may not be the best solution (I’d like some fairly radical changes), but it’s certainly not crazy, given that it did give France those 30 great years.

The failure to deal with the oil price shock doomed the post-war world, yes. But it is 40 years later and we have technology and knowledge they did not have.

Until the developed world’s sanctioned intellectuals (as opposed to pariahs like myself and my ilk) and their masters come to grip with these facts, the population will continue to turn elsewhere. They may turn to sane and reasonable people like Corbyn, or they may turn to people like LePen and Trump, but people will not put up with “it’s going to get worse for the forseeable future” forever.

We can have reasonable policies, which will make the world better for everyone (even if that means there will be a lot less billionaires–the Corbyn solution), or we can have the rise of fascists and their left-wing equivalents.

The room in the mushy middle for those who aren’t willing to do something radical to fix the economy and other problems is narrowing. It will continue to narrow.

Our current elites will not adjust, so the question is: Who will we get? Corbyn and FDR? Mussolini, LePen, Trump?

Neo-liberalism is nearing the end of its cycle. It will kill a lot of people dying, but its death is now ordained and can only be slowed by fanatical levels of police state repression in a few countries. And its death convulsions and the birth pangs of the new system will create a new age of war and revolution which will kill far more.

This is now as close to inevitable as human affairs, endlessly complicated and subject to unexpected shocks, can be.

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Two Lessons from France’s Yellow Vest Protests

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On January 15, 2019

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So, the Yellow Vests in France have French President Macron scared, and he has given to some of their demands, including raising the monthly minimum wage and getting rid of the diesel tax which sparked the original protests.

Joe Penney at the Intercept has a good overview of the current state of play, which I encourage you to read.

What I want to discuss, however, is WHY they are having some success where unions, for example, could not stop Macron.

No Centralized Control

The great weakness of modern unions is leadership, bank accounts, and law. They are easy to break if the state cooperates with corporations, or even by the state alone. You can bribe the leadership, you can scare the leadership, or you can break the union.

Because unions have things like headquarters, leaders, and bank accounts, the state can simply take all of those things away any time it wants to if the unions don’t have enough internal support in the government to prevent it.

This matters because unions tend to have centralized leadership: Take out the leadership, get rid of the strike funds, and the union can be broken.

The Yellow Vests have none of this. What tiny leadership they have is exercised through some Facebook pages. They have no united bank account, no buildings, no strike funds, etc. They cannot be broken by a strike on a few people and some pooled resources.

Instead the, Yellow Vests are just whoever wants to show up for any given protest and put on a yellow vest. This causes some problems, yes, but it means that they cannot easily be taken out.

Scare The Opposition (State/Corporate) Leadership

Why is Macron giving in to some demands? Well, perhaps because he’s scared (and, I suspect, personally a coward, which he has struck me as from the first.)

During the January 5 edition, protesters commandeered a forklift and broke open the office door of Macron spokesperson Benjamin Griveaux, forcing him to flee through the back entrance, while an ex-professional boxer was filmed punching and kicking a gendarme. Some reports have stated that Macron is worried for his personal safety. In December, protesters attempted to break through police lines that were guarding his home in Touquet, and his wife’s family has voiced concerns that their chocolate shop in their hometown, Amiens, will be attacked.

Cue laughter, because I have no sympathy for Macron or his lackeys. (I have a little sympathy for his family, but not much. I’ll discuss this further in a bit.)

Here’s the thing: Most protests get nowhere because they threaten no one and nothing. The elite, being rich and powerful, can wait out those harmless protests they cannot buy, scare, or break. They know it.

This is why the union protests against Macron also failed. He just waited them out. Unions cannot tell their members to try to attack political leaders. (Though sometimes such things happen and are “regrettable” and a good union then makes sure the people who did it have good lawyers.)

Macron is scared. He is scared for himself. For his family. For his staff and probably for his friends.

There are people he cares about who could wind up catching a good beating or worse. (Given that the police have killed a number of protesters, please spare me any wringing of hands.)

Normally, no one a politician cares about is threatened. Protesters get beaten, maybe the occasional cop gets a beating (being a cop is NOT dangerous compared to most manual labor jobs so also spare me the hand wringing about people who beat people for a living, very occasionally getting beaten themselves).

But politicians and corporate leaders are safe. The protesters suffer, strikers lose money, etc, etc.

The Yellow Vests have threatened Macron. He is personally frightened, and he is giving in.

Always, always find a way to threaten your opponents directly if the stakes merit it. Find something or someone they care about and go after it.

Now, because many people are wringing their hands, let’s deal with that directly.

There is a great essay by Mark Twain called “The Two Reigns of Terror.” Please go read it.

Macron’s policies and those of France’s elites have made poor French and many middl-class French poorer for two generations now. Macron, in particular, has made it easier to fire people, raised regressive taxes, and broken unions. He is a neoliberal’s neoliberal who believes that a more precarious, poorer workforce will lead to prosperity. The fact that this ideology has been tried since 1979 and not worked does not stop ideologues like Macron. Clearly, they reason, if it hasn’t worked, it hasn’t been tried in a pure enough form.

Macron and the French elites’ policies KILL people. These deaths show up in the statistics. They don’t have dramatic pictures. But there are more suicides, poorer people die younger, people under financial stress drink more, beat their wives more, and so on.

Death and suffering is what neoliberalism causes. Macron is a murderer, in the name of an ideology which has never worked–despite being tried in most of the First World and much of the developing world.

So, if Macron is scared, and if a few of his relatives or friends or employees (all of whom are very well-looked after), happen to catch a bit of the violence flying around, so be it. It didn’t bother Macron that people were suffering and dying when they were people he didn’t care about.

The Future

The problem with the Yellow Vests, to my mind, is that while the protests include left, right, and the formerly apathetic, they seem to be resounding more to the benefit of the hard right than the left.

One of the things I have been watching carefully is where various countries are going to land as neoliberalism collapses.

There are three primary choices: populist left, populist right, or repressive surveillance/police state.

Right now, I think that the US and Britain have a good chance to land on the populist left. I thought France might, with Melenchon’s left-wing party being very close to LaPen in the last election.

But I am beginning to wonder.

One of the problems is that, fundamentally, if neoliberals are going down, they’d rather surrender to fascists than the left. The fascists will let them keep most of their money and power, and will break the unions for them, and so on. (The Nazis were not socialists, despite their name. Under their reign, worker wages dropped, and executive wages skyrocketed.)

So we’ll see how this all plays out. However it does, the lessons are clear enough.

Hit the “masters” where they hurt, and make sure you have no center to target that they can destroy or subvert.

And if you do get them on the ground, which the Yellow Vests have yet to do, keep kicking. Rest assured, they will keep kicking if they can get to you.

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The French Yellow Jacket Protests

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On December 2, 2018

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So, there are major protests across France, protesting Macron’s policies. Macron has raised fuel taxes and removed worker protections, among other things. He is a neoliberal’s neoliberal, who believes in free labor markets (a.k.a. markets where workers can be easily fired, made to work overtime, and so on.)

His popularity rating is 20 percent, there is no chance that he will be re-elected, and he is unlikely to give in to any protests–both because he is a true believer and because his future is assured if he pushes through as much destruction of France’s social state as possible. He will be rewarded by the rich.

Some of the protests have been somewhat violent (I am not all that impressed by property violence as “terrible”), and, of course, the French police have brutally beaten many protestors. It always amuses me to watch the so-called brave surrounding a man to kick him while he’s down. Any man who participates in such a beating outs himself as a coward, the same as any man who tortures someone who cannot resist.

While it seems unlikely, it wouldn’t bother me if the current French state was overthrown.

More likely, what will matter is whether La Pen or Melenchon (who is a real left-winger) wins the next election. Hopefully the French are not so stupid as to vote for another pretty neoliberal.

Little that has been done by Macron, or other neoliberal twats, cannot be undone if a government is elected with a mandate to do so.

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France Ends Freedom

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On October 9, 2017

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The terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom, but if they did, well, they’d stop attacking France.

Fifty seven percent of the French approve, according to a poll.

It takes so very little to get people to give up their freedom. Find an enemy, have a few atrocities, and they’ll squeal for you to take it from them. Shades of Goerring’s comment on how easy it is to get citizens to line up behind wars.

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Such laws as France has passed, will be used against others. The anti-terrorism laws in the US have been used vigorously against environmental protestors, including entirely peaceful ones.

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Centuries ago Machiavelli observed that some peoples lacked sufficient virtue for freedom. They could only be ruled by despots. Increasingly, the West has shown that they have fallen into this class.

While the young are quite good on issues of economic fairness (out of self interest), they are not particularly good on most civil liberties, so we cannot be sure that the tide moving through the Anglo-West, towards more equal economic arrangements and less corporate control will necessarily push back on civil liberties abuses.

Humans didn’t evolve to live in large societies. We are terrible at it, and our decision-making heuristics are not capable of handling it. We cannot evaluate threats properly, our enlarged senses of identity (like nationalism and ethnic identification) are easily hijacked and usually we are unable to change our minds about anything important once we become an adult unless there is a catastrophe which personally devastates us, and when there is, we simply pick up (as Friedman noted) whatever ideas are around, rather than think critically.

And so, so much for Liberte.

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