"I have lived in France for almost five years. During all this time, there has not been a year/season without protests, of which vandalism is an integral part. In political science, there is a theory about models of relations with power - how citizens exert pressure so that the power hears them. In France, the traditional model is politique contestataire/(contentious politics), lit. conflict politics.
Unlike, for example, the USA, where relations with power take place through lobbying, local structures and indirect pressure, which is why we very rarely see mass protests and 2020 was a public shock, in countries like France, protest is a traditional tool for regulating citizens' demands. And cars are also set on fire for good reasons, for example when France won the World Cup (2018-2019, if I'm not mistaken)".
This is what Joanna Elmi, a journalist and writer, wrote in a comment on the social network Facebook. We are publishing it in its entirety without editorial intervention:
"I am not writing this to investigate whether vandalism is justified or not, nor to comment on who the perpetrators are. According to my humble direct observations during blockades and strikes (which observations, of course, cannot be compared to the videos you watch from the couch at home and I have no claims to that), it is always about mixed groups - there are people with extreme ideological views who are ready to protest for any reason; there are vandals; there are provocateurs - none of this cancels the legitimacy of the protest and its demands.
It simply complicates, obscures, sometimes dilutes and kills the meaning. At a higher level, of course, every legitimate conflict in Europe immediately goes through the washing machine of Russian propaganda, which has been busy predicting the decline of Europe for about two hundred years now, instead of completing its sewage system. But that's another topic.
The next concept that is important is what is the principle through which a country defines belonging. France embodies the great contradiction of being both the cradle of democracy as we know and understand it today, and having a legacy of a strong class division. This division is not white/colored, French/migrant; it is cultural (working class families/bourgeois ones), social (where you come from, where you live, what your parents do, what you do).
In such a society, it is extremely difficult to emigrate and live as a white European, let alone as a person from another culture. Segregation, racism, violence (including police violence) and all the like remain problems in France. And this is completely separate from cultural and social differences, religious extremism (we remember Charlie Hebdo, I hope) and so on.
The third important factor is something that Yavor Siderov wrote very well - the weakening and fatigue of the welfare state are most visible where it was strongest. Everywhere, more and more people do not see a perspective in the democratic, neoliberal, capitalist social order. Those who defend it with clichés have not yet realized that it has long ceased to exist in this form and that if they feel it this way, it is because it works for them.
Still - because another year or two at this rate and things will look different. Inequalities are worsening. The state is finding it increasingly difficult to support people who have become accustomed to relying on it. The state itself as a foundation is being attacked from the right. Educational systems cannot cope with the present and do not prepare anyone for the future.
The nation-state is slowly being displaced by technological oligarchy in the same way that monarchy was once displaced by the mercantile (commercial) class to give birth to republicanism; The difference is that this time there is no common vision, values, or aspiration for the better - there is a desire for optimization for the sake of optimization (i.e., without regard to the long-term consequences or what optimizing actually means), accelerating crises, and redistributing wealth to a handful of people who sincerely believe that the majority of people do not deserve to live well and it is not their responsibility to ensure this.
In deals and agreements like the one between Putin and Trump (or in the fact that the Russian oligarchy paid for Trump's son's wedding, which I will write about next week in Toest), in banquets where we see all the tech dads at tables along with key players in the Chinese market, for example, they show that nationalism is now a fool's errand - the supreme value is global capital, everything else is bread and butter.
Against this background, people who see the solution in the far right, nationalism and a return to some invented traditions are just as ridiculous as those who do not see that the democratic order as it was built after the Second World War is slipping and collapsing. Those who point to migrants as the main problem are just as blind as those who see sympathy for communism in any criticism of capitalism, which has long ceased to work as we imagined it behind our iron curtains.
These reactions are normal - as much as some believe that there is a return to some golden ideal of the nation, others are just as sure that there is a way to return to the golden years when the market and democracy could coexist and respect each other. Macron's centrism in France promised some middle ground, some new system, a new solution. We see how far it goes.
All this is impossible, and the more time we waste in pointless ideological disputes, the more we ignore the real problems: the uncontrolled development of technologies that do not work for the benefit of society in the long term; the widespread corruption; the rotting education systems; the trampling of all values from Ukraine to Gaza; the climate crisis, which will become more and more delicately relevant every year, until it finally becomes our only tangible problem.
Such appeals and reflections are, of course, completely pointless. People have always lived and will continue to live in the automatism of their own fears and clichés. One of the greatest crises of our time is that we are slaves to our own comfort, and qualitative changes in our systems require the sacrifice of this comfort, at least for a while - our democracy was born in blood in this same France, which took a century and a little to cry free; the same goes for American democracy, where every victory that we today call progress and take for granted comes after much resistance.
And the tension between old and new systems leads us to two world wars, in whose lull we lived and were deceived that this was the norm, not the exception. We forgot that it depends on us to make it the norm, not on our politicians. That we are responsible, collectively. And that sometimes means being difficult.
I write all this simply because I still want to believe that there is some sense in other narratives, besides those that only deepen divisions and problems, fighting symptoms without looking for the root causes. Of course, I may be wrong, and with songs in the squares and declarations of indignation to defeat those who kill civilians and destroy the world in the name of profit. My prediction, however, is that the more we bury our heads in the sand and refuse to call things by their real names, arguing about who is red and who is blue, the worse it will get."
Source: news.bg