Paris Is Burning

 

As he was brown nosing the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires on Friday, President Emmanuel Macron of France confessed to the butcher of Istanbul that "I am worried." 

Which well he should be - this weekend, his capital city was engulfed in a further round of street protests and riots that saw cars torched, the Arc de Triomphe damaged and police firing tear gas into crowds in the distinctive gilets jaunes (yellow vests) of the protest movement that has swept the country.

A tax on petrol as part of Macron's policy on reducing carbon emissions to tackle climate change sparked the initial demonstrations outside the capital. The jackets are a compulsory requirement for French motorists to keep in their vehicles in case of emergencies and so were donned to symbolise the problem the tax poses to many less well off people living in the countryside, where public transport has very low penetration. This last fortnight, the anger has come to the capital and shows little sign of abating. Both the far right Front National (now renamed the Rassmeblement National, or National Rally) of Marine Le Pen and a range of left-wing parties and groups have joined in what has become a reaction against the entire Macroniste project.

Macron, a former Socialist Minister under neoliberal President Hollande, resigned and set up his own party to challenge as a centrist for the Presidency. He was elected barely 18 months ago offered up liberal platitudes and wild promises of national renewal. An Obama-esque character, the peculiarities of France's two-round voting system saw him narrowly lead a four-way competition between himself and the neofascist, conservative and radical left candidates in the first round, where he led with just 24% of the vote. With far-right Le Pen as his sole opponent in the second round, he saw her off by 66% to 34%, the latter still the highest vote for a fascist-sympathising movement anywhere in western Europe since the 1930s. Notably, the turnout fell by nearly five million between the two rounds and although his En Marche! movement swept to a big majority in Assembly elections a few weeks later, Macron's Presidency was built on sand from the outset.

Like so many liberals, his response to fascism hasn't been to expose it and face it down for the dangerous and inhumane ideology that it is; instead, he has adopted parts of it, making noises he presumably believes will cut the ground from under Le Pen as she contemplates a further assault on the Elysee in 2024. He has legislated to increase the working week, to curtail immigration, re-introduce compulsory military service and cut taxes for the rich. And although his petrol tax is ostensibly an environmental measure, his Environment Minister resigned in August in protest at Macron's failure to take any significant measures to actually cut carbon emissions - many yellow jackets have been at pains to assert their protests are not about opposing action on climate change, but simply about how they are supposed to function day to day on a personal level.

In a country as affected as any by the collapse of traditional industries and deepening inequality, Macron's association with a wealthy liberal elite has led to him tumbling to near-record lows of minus 46% in terms of public approval. This led to him being mocked, for once accurately, by US President Trump, whose own low poll ratings look like a triumph in comparison. Similarly, damage has been done through Macron's imperious manner, attested to in a number of tetchy exchanges with ordinary people where his moderate mask has slipped to reveal his evident disdain towards the poor as hectored and lectured about appropriate behaviour and the need for individual effort. He seems not so much a would-be Napoleon as an aspiring Roi Soleil.

Marine Le Pen of the RN, formerly the Front Nationale

France however is now surfacing the fault lines of the age - Macron and his tired out liberalism look set to be sucked into the centrist vortex they have themselves created.

In their place, neither the traditional conservative Republicans nor the old Socialist Party look set for any comeback. Instead, gradually, French voters are moving towards either the FN/RN, on the far right or, on the left, La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), a broad movement of former and new communists, ecosocialist greens and radical socialists. It is these two sharply opposed groupings or some successors to them that are likely to bring the neoliberal collapse to a head in the near future in the faltering Fifth Republic.

Jean-Luc Melenchon of La France Insoumise

The challenge for the Left will be that old chestnut of unity. The FN/RN hard right leads with 20% to Macron's En Marche's 19.5% in the latest poll for next June's European elections. The radical Left is on 23.5%, but this is split between six political groups (though excludes the old Socialist Party's 7% share).

It would be a tragedy of Weimar proportions if the coming historic choice was to go the wrong way because of leftist reductio ad absurdum ideological spats or, worse still, distinctly un-socialist personality clashes.

The stakes are too high; and Paris is burning.

The Golden Sands of Mali

How quickly things can change. Harold Wilson is credited with saying a week is a long time in politics. Well, two months is an eternity.

Back in November, a book was published showing that Britain has attacked 90% of the countries of the world at some point in our history. Only 22 countries had escaped our ire.

Now, after the UK Government's declaration that it is sending 240 military "trainers" to war-torn Mali and its neighbours, arguably that total is now down to 21. As if desperate not to miss out on the action, the Cameron Coalition has pledged support to the French-led force that has arrived in the country and is driving northwards, taking the legendary city of Timbuktu just yesterday.

The official narrative, of course, is that the western troops are saving a moderate regime which until their intervention was at the mercy of foaming, bloodthirsty al-Qaeda terrorists - Islamists, the news reporters keep parroting. And yet, as ever, the truth is far more complicated.

The official Mali government is in fact a military dictatorship that seized power in 2013 and whose troops stand accused by international human rights monitors of the same atrocities as its opponents. Its coup d'etat sparked long-oppressed Tuareg tribes in the north to declare their independence and within a short time fighting broke out. Always ready for conflict in the name of religion, there is no doubt that a fair number of mujahadeen turned up to aid the Tuaregs - but to characterise the northern insurgency as some sort of jihad is overstatement of the highest order and indeed northern Mali (renamed Azawad) has also seen heavy conflict between the Tuaregs and the Islamists. Rather, the issue is the declaration of independence being viewed as a threat to the corporate interests of French mining and mineral companies operating in the country - because Mali literally is a gold mine. As well as being the third largest producer of gold in Africa, it additionally has large deposits of uranium, diamonds and other precious metals.

And so, yet again, our troops are being sent off on a dubious mission creep, placing them in harm's way and our nation at risk for the benefit of multinationals under the guise of a war for freedom and faith. Along with a range of other western countries, we are supporting the bombing of towns by French and Malian aircraft - precisely the same tactic we have condemned the Syrian regime for deploying in its bloody civil conflict. But yet again, under cover of nobler aims, we excuse the excess and justify it by anathematizing the other side. So the blood continues to flow - and so do the profits.

21 countries to go (these are the only countries in the world never invaded by Britain):

Andorra

Belarus

Bolivia

Burundi

Central African Republic

Chad

Congo, Republic of

Guatemala

Ivory Coast

Kyrgyzstan

Liechtenstein

Luxembourg

Marshall Islands

Monaco

Mongolia

Paraguay

Sao Tome and Principe

Sweden

Tajikistan

Uzbekistan

Vatican City

Little Children, Big Guns and Dark Hearts

Miriam Monstango, 8 years old - her face a little apprehensive but full of life as she looks to the camera. How apprehensive it must have looked on Monday morning as she ran for the safety of her schoolroom at a Jewish school in Toulouse in France, only to have her hair caught by the gunman who was firing at her classmates. When he tried to shoot Miriam, his gun jammed. But he gripped onto her while he switched to another weapon and shot her in the head. On the same day, he killed a rabbi and his two little children - the youngest just three years old.

This was apparently done, in the gunman's mind, in revenge for the hundreds of Palestinian children killed by the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza and the West Bank. As blogged before here, the IDF routinely blames Hamas and others for the so-called "collateral damage" that occurs when Israeli jets strafe Gaza indiscriminately, or when IDF tanks fire illegal white phosphorus shells into Palestinian hospitals, allegedly having "no choice" because of the presence of enemy fighters in the vicinity. For collateral damage, of course, the decoded words should be civilians and children - especially the more than 1,400 Palestinian children killed by the Israeli military during the last decade, most of them when they were committing such dreadful acts as playing football, going to school or even shopping. No more excusably, though perhaps demonstrating the massive imbalance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, during the same period, 125 Israeli children were killed in Palestinian attacks. (The western media tends to ignore this fact, just as, while it has already designated the Toulouse gunman, Mohammed Merah, as a Muslim extremist, it is hard at work mitigating the murderous rampage by US soldier Robert Bales, who killed at least two babies in his slaughter of 17 Afghan civilians last week, as the product of prolonged stress.)

We will never know for certain Merah's state of mind or motives now that the French police have shot him dead. But his apparent claims of revenge and self-justification of his terrible deeds echo the words of all too many political leaders who seek to sanctify their worldview with religious beliefs that place the fate of individuals, no matter how innocent, below the proclaimed, divinely-ordained interests of the respective Faith community.

Yet what minds think like this, on either or all sides? Under what religious law, what political ideology or vaguely humane rationale do children become collateral damage? By what mindset does it become acceptable to kill a child - any child, anyone's child - because of the loss, however appallingly, of a child of your own, or your faith community?

A Gazan childhood: The final, terrifying moments of the life of
Mohammed al Doura, a 12 year old Palestinian boy killed in 2000.
More here.

Well, there is a mindset which contradictorily both condemns such a viewpoint and validates it. It is a mindset found within the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Between them, these three faiths are followed, at least notionally, by the majority of the people on this planet. They are linked inextricably, although many of their followers vehemently deny this fact, or are unaware perhaps - but their God/Allah is the same Divinity, their prophets - Abraham/Ibrahim, Moses/Musa, Jesus/Isa are often the same people; and the Muslims' final prophet, Muhammed, enjoined his followers to give special protection and respect to Christians and Jews as fellow "People of the Book".

Each faith universally decries killing of humans and prescribes forgiveness and love of neighbours and all humanity. But some followers of each of them doggedly hold to the concept of "reciprocal justice" or like for like punishment - an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth as the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament set out their bloody tariff of vengeance. In Islam, although the Koran mentions rather than promulgates the principle, the other holy writings, the hadith (laws developed over centuries by Islamic scholars) sanction revenge and some versions of sharia law interpret and implement the rule literally. In all these faiths, although all their prophets advocated generosity of spirit and forgiveness, the concept continues to be held by many believers to be both just and holy.

And so we end up with the dreadful, twisted self-justification for shooting up a school playground in France or shelling schoolrooms in Gaza; or the rarely mentioned rape camps of Bosnia set up by Serb Christians with their avowed aim to breed Muslims out of existence - many of the Bosniac Muslim victims were children, some as young as 12.

In the old days of polytheism, by default, pagans held that there are many ways to the same Truth, while philosophers such as Aristotle identified good and evil acts as the deliberate choices of humans, not the mystical interventions or injunctions of God or Satan. But the potential logic of revealed monotheist faith and its potentially exclusive nature means that a gospel of love can be twisted into one of hatred by those so-minded to do so. This is all the more likely if The Word divides the world so sharply into good and evil, into fellow-believers and the unfaithful or Fallen.

Mahatma Gandhi lamented that  - "An eye for an eye simply makes the whole world blind." Those who seek revenge are blind people - blind to the hypocrisy of revenge; blind to the destruction of the justice they seek by acts of injustice; blind to the beauty of the Creation they claim to be the gift of their God.

An eye for an eye - it is not a holy concept at all; it is simply the red mist of the psychopath's pathetic self-regard. Those of any faith or nationality who adopt its tenets do so at the cost of extinguishing the very humanity they claim perversely to supremely epitomise, and almost certainly betray the intent of the founders of their faith and the beliefs of most of their co-religionists. Whether Anders Breivik, or Ariel Sharon or Mohammed Merah, their empty souls are the antithesis of the lives they sacrifice for their own vanity - the lives of the children of Gaza and Toulouse, or the youths on Utoya; lives now gone, but remembered and valued far beyond the banal egos of the small men with big guns and dark hearts.

In the Name of God: since 2000, 125 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinian attacks; in the same period, the Israeli armed services have killed 1,471 Palestinian children.

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