By Dennis Broe
PARIS: The school student protest here in France, whose epicentre is the region’s second-largest and most diverse city, Saint Denis, is every day gathering steam and sometimes forcing the Western corporate media to course correct after their initial slandering of the event.
Rather than depicting crowds of students taking to the new barracks, the blockades around their schools, The New York Times initially gleefully ran a video of a burning rubbish bin, as the symbol of this mobilisation, implying the demonstrators were violent terrorists.
The protests in the secondary schools, have now spread to universities, and engulf not just the students but also unions, teachers and their parents and grandparents, all come not only to support the protests but also to protect their children and grandchildren from what are the actual terrorists, Emmanuel Macron’s police.
The omnipresent banners tell the story about what the students want and what they are reacting to: overcrowding in the schools with teachers who retire or can no longer take the strain not followed by new teachers — “My mother replaces some teachers in burnout but who will replace my mother?”; the call for the state to deal with the problem of underfunding by means other than repressing demonstrators, that is, those who call attention to the problem — “fric non flic,” that is money for education not police; and the unevenness of money spent where those outside Paris and the central cities are more highly underfunded — “Equality does not stop at the gates of the city.”
The signs of burning rubbish, widespread on US social and corporate media, are the mainstream representation of the students’ protest at their future being torn away from them through lack of funding after nine years of Macron’s austerity budgets while also rewarding the richest with major tax breaks.
The disparity between the actual protests and how they are being covered also returns to the way the original French revolution was experienced in the bourgeois media, not as a first attempt at a people’s liberation but as degenerating into what was called “The Terror.”
These emblems, emblazoned in young minds in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, are regurgitated in today’s bourgeois media where property, even rubbish bins, is sacred while the protesters are returning to the French writer Proudhoun’s retort, “Property is theft.”
And indeed, the largest protest with leagues of students swarming the square occurred last week at the Bastille, the sight of the beginning of the 1789 revolution.
It was here, at the birthplace of the revolution, that students acknowledged this heritage by singing Le Marseillaise, originally sung on the fly as workers’ militias marched from Marseille to Paris to meld with the Parisian street revolt.
Trump has called the protests communist and Muslim-inspired, claiming these are the twin threats that will bring down the US from within, a magnificent and astounding case of projection since the force that is most likely to bring down US from within, the true fifth column, is the Trump family and the Trumpists.
Later in the week, with the protests creating an inexorable movement, The Times covered them with a degree of fairness but inserted above their coverage another story about overwhelming French debt hastening an increase in the price of French bonds and making borrowing more difficult for the state. The statement being that there really is no choice other than austerity, no matter what the street may say.
On Tuesday afternoon Marine LePen, who leads in the presidential polls to be held next April, unveiled her own proposed budget, a complete sop to the wealthiest corporations, as she proposes to cut approximately $154 billion (£116.4bn) from the French state.
This is as opposed to the other alternative which is frequently advanced and just as quickly dropped off a 2 per cent tax on the wealthiest to maintain France’s social services.
The protesters, since they are still majority secondary school students, have also called much-needed attention to the Macron government’s standard tactic for dealing with the unrest caused by his government’s transfer of wealth upward, and that is with fierce police violence.
A 15-year old’s hand was blown off and 16-year old is now blinded in one eye, most likely struck by an LBD (“Lanceur de balles de defense”) riot gun. Over 5,000 mostly secondary school students have been arrested and many then held in detention.
Students are also upset about another Macron “efficiency innovation” and that is the installation of a Elon Musk-type computer application titled Parcoursup which now handles and supposedly systematises university applications.
The system is slow in getting back to students about whether they have been accepted or rejected while also being accused of favouring those from the wealthiest and best-connected schools. The problem is accentuated by the opaqueness of the system. Nobody knows what criteria it uses in a selection that in France is absolutely crucial in determining the future course of a student’s life.
The protests have also been the occasion for accusations against the most popular left party, La France Insoumise (LFI), claiming that the party and its leader and presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon instigated the rebellion. A popular accusation on the right and centre-right, fearful that the second round of the next election could pit the far-right’s Le Pen against LFI’s Melenchon.
The charge has been refuted, even by the centrist Le Monde, no friend of Melenchon, which claimed in an article on its origins that this was a spontaneous uprising. Where the LFI has been important and where it might make significant gains come next April when many of these students will have reached voting age, is in safeguarding the protesters. (IPA Service)
Courtesy: Morning Star
