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French government threatens bloody crackdown on “yellow vest” protest

By Alex Lantier and Francis Dubois

8 December 2018

Ahead of today’s marches by “yellow vest” protesters against President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, the French government issued unprecedented threats of a bloody crackdown in the capital. Amid rising support for the “yellow vests” among students and workers, and mounting popular anger with Macron, top officials are warning that they will stop at nothing to intimidate and threaten protesters. Some 89,000 riot police and armored vehicles are to be deployed today.

Macron’s attempt to shut down the protest by first postponing and then ultimately canceling the fuel tax increase that first provoked the demonstrations has failed. Instead, the movement has continued to spread across France and internationally, to Belgium, the Netherlands, and as far as Iraq. Amid growing demands by “yellow vests” for large wage increases, taxes on the rich, and more social equality, which his government has no intention of fulfilling, Macron is preparing for a showdown.

Yesterday, as authorities closed monuments across Paris and shops boarded up storefront windows to prepare for rioting, spokesman Benjamin Griveaux spoke to Le Parisien to slander the “yellow vests” as cop killers. “They are coming to smash, burn, pillage, and attack with the intention of killing representatives of public order,” Griveaux said. Asked if he was telling protesters not to come to Paris, he replied: “That is the advice that I would give.”

Griveaux gave no evidence to support his charge that “yellow vests” intend to kill police. After three Saturdays of protests in which violent police charges led to four deaths and left hundreds injured, not a single policeman has died. He admitted that the government made “mistakes” and did not understand “the feeling that the government is abandoning some regions of France.” He also admitted that Macron, who denounced workers opposed to his austerity policies and tax cuts for the rich as “lazy,” is seen as arrogant: “Some things we said hurt. We know it very well.”

Nonetheless, Griveaux adopted what Le Parisien called a “deliberately alarmist” tone and implying that a crackdown using deadly force is imminent against anyone defying his order not to attend protests in Paris. “Those who are present in the protests do not allow the security forces to proceed to make arrests,” he complained. “Yellow vest protesters who are sincere should not function as human shields.”

Ahead of today’s marches by “yellow vest” protesters against President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, the French government issued unprecedented threats of a bloody crackdown in the capital. Amid rising support for the “yellow vests” among students and workers, and mounting popular anger with Macron, top officials are warning that they will stop at nothing to intimidate and threaten protesters. Some 89,000 riot police and armored vehicles are to be deployed today.

Macron’s attempt to shut down the protest by first postponing and then ultimately canceling the fuel tax increase that first provoked the demonstrations has failed. Instead, the movement has continued to spread across France and internationally, to Belgium, the Netherlands, and as far as Iraq. Amid growing demands by “yellow vests” for large wage increases, taxes on the rich, and more social equality, which his government has no intention of fulfilling, Macron is preparing for a showdown.

Yesterday, as authorities closed monuments across Paris and shops boarded up storefront windows to prepare for rioting, spokesman Benjamin Griveaux spoke to Le Parisien to slander the “yellow vests” as cop killers. “They are coming to smash, burn, pillage, and attack with the intention of killing representatives of public order,” Griveaux said. Asked if he was telling protesters not to come to Paris, he replied: “That is the advice that I would give.”

Griveaux gave no evidence to support his charge that “yellow vests” intend to kill police. After three Saturdays of protests in which violent police charges led to four deaths and left hundreds injured, not a single policeman has died. He admitted that the government made “mistakes” and did not understand “the feeling that the government is abandoning some regions of France.” He also admitted that Macron, who denounced workers opposed to his austerity policies and tax cuts for the rich as “lazy,” is seen as arrogant: “Some things we said hurt. We know it very well.”

Nonetheless, Griveaux adopted what Le Parisien called a “deliberately alarmist” tone and implying that a crackdown using deadly force is imminent against anyone defying his order not to attend protests in Paris. “Those who are present in the protests do not allow the security forces to proceed to make arrests,” he complained. “Yellow vest protesters who are sincere should not function as human shields.”

The video has been seen millions of times on social media, provoking shock and horror. Castaner brazenly defended the police forces, however: “This corresponds to standard practice before frisking someone.” Police are now investigating the identity of the person who shot the video in order to press charges.

Should the Macron government act today on the hysterical threats it made yesterday, it would lead to the most violent confrontation with the working class in France since bloody police assaults on workers and youth defending Sorbonne students provoked the 1968 general strike.

The growing radicalization of the working class underlying the protests emerged clearly in the “yellow vest” collective in Commercy, in eastern France, which issued a video “call for the formation of popular assemblies across France.”

It rejected the government’s call for protesters to designate representatives with whom Macron could negotiate: “It is not to understand our anger and our demands that the government wants representatives to talk with. It is to control and to bury us. Like the union leaderships, they seek intermediaries, people to talk to, to pressure to stop the eruption, whom they can then corrupt and convince to divide the movement so as to strangle it.”

They added that the “yellow vest” protests call for “a new order in which those who are nothing, and are spoken of with contempt, take back the power from all those who are stuffing themselves, from the rulers and the powers of money.”

Across France, strikes, “yellow vest” protests and student blockades are mounting as Macron continues to sink in the polls. Paris regional trains, Rennes and Le Havre mass transit, and vocational high schools are on strike, while the National Railways (SNCF) workers will protest and march at the “yellow vest” rallies tomorrow in Paris. Hundreds of gas stations across France are running out of fuel amid refinery strikes or blockades of fuel depots by “yellow vest” protesters. The National Farmers Union Federation (FNSEA) called its members to protest in the streets this coming week.

The Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT) union called off at the last minute a national truck drivers strike it had called to begin at the weekend, however. The CGT bureaucracy is vitriolically hostile to the “yellow vests,” and CGT boss Philippe Martinez, who previously said they were infiltrated by neo-fascists, gave another interview to Le Monde to denounce them. He insisted again that the CGT would not “come together” with the “yellow vest” protesters, saying that among them there are “people you can’t frequent.”

High school students continued to blockade hundreds of schools in cities across France including Paris, Bordeaux, Nantes, Toulouse, Tours, Montpellier, Lille, Lyon and beyond. They were joined by university students at the Censier and Tolbiac campuses of the University of Paris, protesting against the tuition hike for foreign students. Police violently charged protesting students at University of Lyon-III. The National Union of French Students (UNEF) is calling for a one-day protest against the tuition hikes for December 13.

“Yellow vest” protests are taking place in cities across France, in the face of unprecedented mobilizations of the security forces. Marseille authorities are preparing a large police deployment against multiple protest marches, as right-wing regional president Renaud Muselier launched yesterday his “Marseille declaration” warning that the “Republic is endangered” by “insurrection.” The police prefect in northern France has taken the unprecedented step of banning all “yellow vest” protests, as calls spread in Lille to occupy both train stations and blockade the entire city.

In Lyon, where “yellow vest” protesters occupied regional government headquarters yesterday, authorities are planning to block off Bellecour square, where the “yellow vests” will meet today. There, they will face an unprecedented police deployment reportedly including members of elite police assault squads trained to shoot and kill terror bombers.

(WSWS)

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The “Grievance Studies” hoax exposes postmodernist charlatans

On October 2, Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian published an article titled “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship,” incorporating the results of a year-long effort to publish hoax articles, deliberately comprised of bunk facts and irrational and reactionary conclusions, in academic journals associated with gender, racial and identity studies.

The results expose the intellectual bankruptcy of identity politics and postmodernist philosophy. Their proponents, who dominate university humanities departments worldwide, are charlatans who have published or given favorable “revise and resubmit” comments to the most absurd and vulgar pseudo-scientific arguments.

These include: a purported 1,000-hour study of dog “humping” patterns at dog parks that concludes by calling for human males to be “trained” like dogs to prevent rape culture; a long-form poem produced through a teenage angst poetry generator about women holding spiritual-sexual “moon meetings” in a secret “womb room” and praying to a “vulva shrine;” a proposal to develop feminist robots, trained to think irrationally, to control humanity and subjugate white men; and additional articles relating to male masturbation. Another proposal, which was praised by reviewers in a paper that was ultimately rejected, encouraged teachers to place white students in chains to be shamed for their “white privilege.”

There is an element of humor in the fact that such drivel could win accolades from academics and journals. The “dog park” article was even selected as one of the most influential contributions in the history of the Gender, Place and Culture journal!

But the implications of the study are deadly serious. Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian have confirmed the right-wing political essence of identity politics and postmodernist thought, based on anti-Marxism, irrationalism and the rejection of the Enlightenment and objective truth.

Most chillingly, the authors also submitted a re-write of a chapter from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, with language altered to reference female identity and feminism. The paper, titled “Our struggle is my struggle: solidarity feminism as an intersectional reply to neoliberal and choice feminism,” was accepted for publication and greeted with favorable reviews.

“I am extremely sympathetic to this article’s argument and its political positioning,” one academic wrote. Another said, “I am very sympathetic to the core arguments of the paper.”

In the wake of their public disclosure, Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian have come under attack by the proponents of postmodernism and identity politics, who claim the hoax is a right-wing attack on “social justice” disciplines.

Typical is the argument of Daniel Engber, who wrote in Slate: “How timely, too, that this secret project should be published in the midst of the Kavanaugh imbroglio—a time when the anger and the horror of male anxiety is so resplendent in the news. ‘It’s a very scary time for young men,’ Trump told reporters on the very day that Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian went public with their hoax. Both express a fear of false attacks on men, whether levied by regretful sluts, lefty liberals, radical academics, or whoever else.”

In reality, the hoax has exposed the fact that it is the proponents of identity politics who are advancing views parallel to the far right. While they are enraged with those who voice concern about the elimination of due process and the presumption of innocence for the targets of the #MeToo campaign, they are unbothered by the fact that the writings of Adolf Hitler are published and praised in feminist academic circles.

Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian are self-described liberals who are concerned that the present identity hysteria is “pushing the culture war to ever more toxic and existential polarization,” by fanning the flames of the far right. As a result, identitarians are “affecting activism on behalf of women and racial and sexual minorities in a way which is counterproductive to equality aims by feeding into right-wing reactionary opposition to those equality objectives.”

In contrast, the authors’ aim is to “give people—especially those who believe in liberalism, progress, modernity, open inquiry, and social justice—a clear reason to look at the identitarian madness coming out of the academic and activist left and say, ‘No, I will not go along with that. You do not speak for me.’”

The hoax’s authors are correct to link the identity politics proponents’ hostility to equality with their opposition to rationalism, scientific analysis and the progressive gains of the Enlightenment. But the roots of this right-wing, irrationalist, anti-egalitarian degeneration are to be found in the economic structure of capitalist society.

The academic architects of postmodernism and identity politics occupy well-paid positions in academia, often with salaries upwards of $100,000–$300,000 or more. As a social layer, the theoreticians of what the World Socialist Web Site refers to as the “pseudo-left” are in the wealthiest 10 percent of American society. Their political and philosophical views express their social interests.

The obsession with “privilege,” sex, and racial and gender identity is a mechanism by which members and groups within this layer fight among themselves for income, social status and positions of privilege, using degrees of “oppression” to one up each other in the fight for tenure track jobs, positions on corporate or non-profit boards, or election to public office. A chief purpose of the #MeToo campaign, for example, is to replace male executives and male politicians with women, while ignoring the social needs of the vast majority of working class women.

The weaponization of identity politics is directed down the social ladder as well. By advancing the lie that white workers benefit from “white privilege,” for example, the proponents of identity politics argue: the spoils of Wall Street should not go to meeting the social needs of the working class, including white workers, who face record rates of alcoholism, poverty, opioid addiction, police violence and other indices of social misery. Instead, the world’s resources should go to me. It is this visceral class hatred that serves as the basis for absurd and reactionary arguments like those advanced in the hoax papers.

Nor have the politics of racial identity improved the material conditions for the vast majority of minority workers. Inequality within racial minorities has increased alongside the introduction of affirmative action programs and the increasing dominance of identity politics in academia and bourgeois politics. In 2016, the top 1 percent of Latinos owned 45 percent of all Latino wealth, while the top 1 percent of African-Americans owned 40.5 percent and the richest whites owned 36.5 percent of white wealth.

The influence of postmodernism in academia exploded in the aftermath of the mass protests of the 1960s and early 1970s. Based explicitly on a rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class and opposition to the “meta narrative” of socialist revolution, it is not accidental that identity politics and postmodernism have now been adopted as official ideological mechanisms of bourgeois rule.

In recent decades, a massive identity politics industry has been erected, with billions of dollars available from corporate funds and trusts for journals, non-profits, publications, fellowships and political groups advancing racial or gender politics. Identity politics has come to form a central component of the Democratic Party’s electoral strategy. Imperialist wars are justified on the grounds that the US is intervening to protect women, LGBT people and other minorities.

The growing movement of the working class, broadening strikes across industries and widespread interest in socialism on college campuses pose an existential threat to the domination of postmodernism. Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian have struck a well-timed blow against this reactionary obstacle to the development of scientific socialist consciousness.

Eric London via WSWS

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In the period of crisis, the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than in the period of boom. The United States will seek to overcome and extricate herself from her difficulties and maladies primarily at the expense of Europe, regardless of whether this occurs in Asia, Canada, South America, Australia or Europe itself, whether this takes place peacefully or through war."

Leon Trotsky

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Immigrant children tied down, hooded, beaten, stripped and drugged

Court documents made public in Virginia and Texas give a glimpse of the systematic brutality being meted out to immigrant children in both public and private jails. Children are strapped down, hooded and beaten, or drugged by force, as part of the everyday procedure in what can only be called the American Gulag. 

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