Even though France is currently
experiencing demonstrations and riots on a scale that hasn’t been seen since at
least the historic year of 1968, we’ve heard relatively little about it from
our media here at home.
This
should suffice to elicit some measure of curiosity from the skeptical.
After
all, over the last so many years, whenever France’s North African and Middle
Eastern Islamic immigrants would spend a few nights burning cars and attacking
police, the media, and the cable news media specifically, would expend no small
measure of their time treating viewers to footage of the mayhem.
This is because such rioting
served the left’s agenda, a program that consists of the promotion of massive
Third World immigration into the West and that relies upon a narrative
featuring white oppressors and non-white victims. These riots could readily be spun as the
consequence of unconscionable material inequality, which in turn could be
interpreted as the function of the “racism” of the white oppressors.
The latest riotous
demonstrations, however, are anything but friendly to most of the media’s
ideology.
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In fact, the causes for the sake of which hundreds of thousands of
folks throughout France have taken to the streets are all but antithetical to those which are characteristically
championed by the left. It is this that explains why the leftist media
has spent precious little time attending to the demonstrations, and why what
attention journalists and pundits have paid it have been accompanied by efforts
to misrepresent it as something that it is not.
For starters, while it is true that demonstrators are indeed incensed
over President Macron’s proposed tax on fuel, to
know only this is to know next to nothing.
At the very most that anyone is justified in concluding is that this latest
proposal of Macron’s is nothing more or less than the proverbial straw that
broke the camel’s back.
The
tax is especially burdensome because it adds to the exorbitant totality of
taxes with which the French middle and lower classes have been saddled, taxes
that are the lifeblood of an immense Welfare State, a socialist system from
which significant numbers of migrants continue to benefit even as the quality
of life of the indigenous French deteriorates.
There is another reason why
this latest tax can’t be viewed in isolation from the larger picture to which
it belongs: The tax on fuel is of a piece with Macron’s program to combat “climate change.”
By increasing the price of
fuel, particularly diesel fuel, it is the objective of Macron’s government—as
it is the objective of every “Green” government everywhere—to render it ever
more difficult, ever more expensive, for average folks to drive their cars.
That the protestors recognize this is borne out by the fact that they call
themselves the “Gilets Jaunes,” or “Yellow Vests”: French motorists are
required by law to sport yellow vests while operating their vehicles.
But the fuel tax was merely
the catalyst for the Yellow Vest demonstrations. Macron, the anti-Trump
over whom the global media elites swooned not very long ago, has since agreed
to drop the controversial tax hike. Yet the demonstrations have only grown,
proving that the ever-expanding Yellow Vest phenomenon signifies much more than
a single tax.
In fact, among other things,
the protesters are demanding “a tax reduction”—tax cuts—“across the board.”
A “climate change” agenda and
the astronomical taxes on the working and middle classes that are required to
implement it; a socialist-Welfare State (and the astronomical taxes on the
working and middle classes that are required to implement it); and a system
that encourages the inundation of a country with foreign peoples who
not only haven’t an interest in assimilating to its traditions, but who seem to
have contempt for them—these and the political elites who advocate on behalf of
these things are the objects against which the Yellow Vests have spent nearly
the last month rebelling.
In other
words, the causes favored by the Yellow Vests sound an awful lot like one and
the same causes for the sake of which Deplorables elected Donald Trump to the
presidency.
Indeed, there is scarcely an
item on the Yellow Vests’ latest list of demands that
Trump couldn’t endorse.
Perhaps it is because of the
sheer size of the protests that the left-leaning media here (and abroad) would
prefer to either not talk about them or misrepresent the facts. Or, which
I think is more likely, maybe it is because the demonstrations are a violent response to essentially leftist, globalist
policies that the left would prefer people not know about them.
For
all of the left’s hysterics over the allegedly rising tide of “racism” and
“white nationalism” that the election of Donald Trump is supposed to have
unleashed, leftists know that their political opponents haven’t posed any
physical threat to them. To put it simply, Republicans, conservatives,
Deplorables—whatever we choose to call them—aren’t known (so far) for
instigating politically-oriented violence.
People
who oppose Big Government’s efforts to control its citizens via high taxes in
the name of fighting “climate change” while forcing those citizens to subsidize
ungrateful, frequently hostile Third World immigrants by enlarging the
Welfare-State don’t typically riot, much less riot on the scale on which the
Yellow Vests are rioting.
But the brute fact of the matter is that, while there are indeed
leftist elements involved with the Yellow Vest demonstrations, rolling over
France is a rebellion that is populist and nationalist in character. Macron’s is the
face of a leftist, globalist elite whose election was seen by his fellow
supra-nationalists throughout the West as a welcome counter-response to the
election of Donald Trump and Brexit.
At the time of his election
in 2017, the BBC reported:
“Most of those running the EU
[European Union] were breathing a sigh of relief, given [the right-wing,
immigration-hawk] Ms. [Marie] Le Pen’s policies and last year’s Brexit
vote.
“Eurpean Commision chief
Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted, ‘happy that the French chose a European future’
while German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Mr. Macron ‘carries the hopes of
millions of French people, and of many people in Germany and the whole of
Europe.’”
Macron was the “It Kid,” as
far as the West’s globalists were concerned.
Now,
though, just a little more than a year after he was elected, his own
people—between 70% and 80% support the Yellow Vest rebellion—want Macron gone.
It
isn’t just the middle class bakers, farmers, blacksmiths, etc. who back the
resistors. So too do many police officers.
The morale of the attendees
at the United Nations Climate Conference, currently transpiring in Poland, has
been dramatically undermined by the
Yellow Vest revolt.
The spirit of the Yellow Vests is now spreading across Europe: The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany,
and Sweden are the most
recent countries in which it’s manifesting itself.
Will it spread to America? Time will
tell. But those media and political elites in America who are intent upon
treating their political opponents as subhuman “deplorables” should pay
meticulous attention to the events unfolding across the pond.
Reprinted with the author’s
permission.
Jack
Kerwick [send
him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple
University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He
is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey
and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith
& Culture.
Copyright © 2018 Jack Kerwick
