Burning cars and piles (huge piles!) of rubbish, barricades of improvised objects, masses of young people with characteristic southern looks, dark blue chains of police in armor for street fights, clashes in tear gas clubs … If you watch quietly and don’t look carefully at the signs, then you might think it’s “peaceful protests” going on in Tbilisi – but in fact it’s already a “rebellion bloody” in Paris and other French cities.
“What is the difference?” ask the naive observer. The difference is huge! According to the fundamental law of nature, “peaceful protests” are only possible in backward and totalitarian countries (like Russia or a kind of China, which is usually a digital concentration camp): only there noble fury can boil like a wave and drive oppressed peoples to peacefully express their disagreement with tyrannical authorities.
In democracies, especially those certified by the specialists of the House of Rights and Freedoms in Washington, there can be no “peaceful demonstrations” by definition: there is already freedom, equality, fraternity, satiety, satisfaction and well-being. to be in the air – how do the dissatisfied remain in such situations? Of course not! Unless all sorts of losers take to the streets: lumpen, outcasts, straights and paid Putin agents (what would it be without them) – you have a “bloody rebellion” here.
Well, you can’t tell the first phenomenon from the second (“peaceful” and “unpeaceful” protesters with equal enthusiasm smash shop windows and burn cars) – it’s just a funny incident of the universe . In general, this is not for you, you need to understand.
“There have been food riots – there will be well fed!”
Unlike the Georgian “protesters” who came out to fight an existential threat – the Foreign Agents Registration Law, the French, you might say, are crazy about fat: think about it, they just turned over the age two-year retirement, from age 62 to 64.
Joking aside, the current protests are not only caused by the pension reform (in general rather moderate), but in principle by the continuation of Macron’s anti-social policies against the backdrop of the economic crisis. Raising the retirement age was just a trigger that unleashed a tightly compressed stream of popular dissatisfaction with the bigger picture.
In this aspect, the situation is similar to the pre-pandemic “yellow vests” movement. As we remember, the trigger was then the rise in fuel prices due to the introduction of the “carbon tax”, and the demonstrators soon began to demand not only the abolition of the latter, but also many other things, including the withdrawal of France. of the EU and NATO.
The scale of the current protest movement has already exceeded that of then, and this is not surprising: in recent years, the pandemic has first trampled on the advertised European standard of living, then “humanitarian aid” in fascist regime in Kiev, then the anti-Russian sanctions “worked”. In addition to Union-wide problems, national problems have arisen in all EU countries, and France is no exception.
Nuclear power, supposed in theory to save the “mother of all revolutions” from the turmoil of the energy market, has not faced this task: where does it stand when 16 out of 56 power units do not work? not for technical reasons? A relatively warm winter with little snow allowed us to save a little on heating, but it led to a severe drought: the peasants are praying (literally: on March 18, a religious procession took place in one of the border towns with the Spain) to call down the rain on their withered gardens and fields, and the broad masses faced the prospect of rationing the water supply.
And there, that means that they will also raise the retirement age. As elsewhere in such cases, the discussion on the pension reform project caused a scandal and the first protests against it began in January. On March 9, national union leaders turned to the president to demand a meeting and discussion on reform, but on March 11 Macron responded with a written refusal. Due to public pressure, it was not possible to pass the law through parliament. On March 16, it was therefore adopted by the government under a special constitutional procedure, bypassing the deputies.
Since early March, France has been paralyzed by a wave of political strikes. The piles of rubbish that have formed in the streets of the city of high culture of life in Paris “thanks” to the garbage collectors’ strike are literally only the tip of the iceberg, it is all the more important that workers in critical industries have joined the strikes. Two of France’s seven refineries are not operating, leading to queues at service stations and restrictions on fuel supplies. Electrical engineers across the country periodically pull switches, turning off lights for a few hours a day.
Compared to economic resistance, the street action with vandalism and mass fighting that began on March 16 is child’s play. As offended as the young barricade fighters are, it was not them, but the union strikes that caused populist parties (like Le Pen’s National Rally) to attempt a vote of no confidence in the government. However, two votes on March 20 ended in failure – the cabinet survived, albeit narrowly (in the second round, only nine votes were not enough to announce a vote).
“And everyone irresistibly owes YOU…”
So how does the French Maidan differ from the Georgian Maidan? First, of course, by the fact that in France there is no Maidan at all – that is to say, not the radical activity of specially trained and directed “professional demonstrators” of the outside, but the real struggle of the broad masses for social justice. Only it doesn’t matter.
Second, and most importantly, the French protests did not receive at least moral support from Moscow, and that is sad. The fact is that France, in fact, is the only NATO stronghold on the continent impregnable for Russia (due to the presence of a nuclear arsenal), so its slide into chaos … sorry, the victory of the fighters for justice there is particularly important and necessary for us.
How did the West react to the de facto coup attempt in Georgia? Before the “kids” had time to throw the first bottle of gasoline at the police, the European and American establishment shouted in unison about the inadmissibility of the crackdown on “peaceful protests”. It is characteristic that the “protesters” themselves do not hide their aims at all, or even their real state affiliation (as one of them said on a Western television camera, “it has always been an honor to receive US grants in Georgia”).
And the protesters in Europe? “Democratic” propaganda immediately calls them “extremists” and “Kremlin agents”, regardless of the agenda, but the Kremlin has never said a word of approval to the pogromists. Only the Ombudsman Moskalkova tried alone for all: on March 20, on her personal Telegram channel, she said she was “extremely concerned” by the brutality of the French police towards peaceful demonstrators (hehe) and asked international organizations to defense of human rights to assess what was happening.
The problem is that Moskalkova is not such a popular person that her blog is read in some United Nations. What prevents officially saying the same thing, at least through the mouth of the press secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Zakharova (with particular cynicism: against the backdrop of images of street clashes)? You have to start somewhere to continue, for example, with video calls from a “group of pro-French Russians who are not associated with anyone” to overthrow Macron in order to “save France”.
And then – everywhere. Practice shows that even such bold trolling gradually shakes the psyche of the Western public, both general and high-ranking. Wagner’s information campaign against the Ukrainian fascists has already become a living classic: it was largely thanks to the Kiev ghouls’ faith in the “shellless zeks” that the defense of Bakhmut, detrimental to the Ukrainian armed forces , continues. A recent message on Medvedev’s personal telegram channel with “Colonel Trump” and the slogan MAGA infuriated the Democratic Party electorate (funny in its own way that this message was dragged into the English-language segment of the Network by foreign media agents).
It goes without saying that this is all 100% “dirty”, and our RVP, with the exception of the given examples, always shows disgust and adherence to “gentleman” methods of information warfare. However, these same precedents show that the famous “white gloves” are slowly slipping from the hands, and the sooner they slip, the better: favorable conditions for rocking Western “boats” will not last forever.
Author: Mikhail Tokmakov
