by Joseph Thomas

Washington continues to infect the Western powers with its mad nuclear war disease, and the fools comply.

New Eastern Outlook
France has recently sent one of its nuclear attack submarines over 10,000 kilometers to the South China Sea for a “patrol.” It is the latest indicator of how strained the underlying credibility is of US foreign policy regarding the South China Sea and its growing conflict with Beijing.

While Washington frames its involvement in the region as “championing” for claimants in the South China Sea, it is recruiting allies further and further flung from its actual waters and appears to merely be using the confrontation to undermine Beijing, not support other nations in the region.

France24 in an article titled, “France wades into the South China Sea with a nuclear attack submarine,” would claim:

The week in France kicked off with a Twitter thread by Defence Minister Florence Parly revealing that French nuclear attack submarine SNA Emeraude was among two navy ships that recently conducted a patrol through the South China Sea.

“This extraordinary patrol has just completed a passage in the South China Sea. A striking proof of our French Navy’s capacity to deploy far away and for a long time together with our Australian, American and Japanese strategic partners,” she tweeted along with a picture of the two vessels at sea.

The mention of Australia, America and Japan is clearly a reference to American efforts to create a united front against China in the Indo-Pacific region. The omission of India, one of the supposed “Quad Alliance” members, should not go unnoticed. Even though it is mentioned elsewhere in the article, it is done as an afterthought.

France is the second European nation to sign up for Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, following the UK which has pledged to send a carrier strike group to the region later this year.

The UK Defence Journal in an article titled, “British Carrier Strike Group heading to Pacific this year,” would note that the UK’s latest aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, would also become involved in the South China Sea dispute along with what the journal reported as:

NATO’s most sophisticated destroyers — the Royal Navy’s Type 45s HMS Diamond and HMS Defender and US Navy Arleigh Burke-class USS The Sullivans as well as frigates HMS Northumberland and HMS Kent from the UK.

It wouldn’t take much imagination to predict the reactions in the West if China, Russia and Iran created a “strike group” and sailed it thousands of miles around the globe to menace the shores of Western nations, yet the provocative and revealing nature of Washington’s policies and the participation of nations in its Indo-Pacific strategy being drawn from further and further away from the actual region is treated as entirely normal, even necessary by the Western media.

The inclusion of the French and British in Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy is necessary because the actual nations in the region, specifically                                                           in Southeast Asia, have little interest in provoking China or turning relatively common maritime disputes into a regional or international crisis.

The US, by attempting to do just that, is actually endangering peace, prosperity and stability in the region, despite posing as the underwriter of all three and on behalf of the very nations refusing to join its provocative naval exercises. Nations in the actual region refuse to join US military activities there specifically because they are seen as counterproductive and a needless, even dangerous escalation.

Creating Conflict, Not Resolving It 

The US, Australia, France and the UK have contributed to the most destructive conflicts of the 21st century including the 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the 2011-onward wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen, and numerous regime change campaigns around the globe.

France in particular also has its military deployed across the continent of Africa, including in several of its former colonies.

The notion that France, alongside its other partners in carrying out military aggression worldwide, is becoming involved in the Indo-Pacific to confront aggression and expansionism rather than to participate in it itself, is dubious at best.

The France24 article would also note that:

In this increasingly tense maritime geopolitical context, France wants to restate that it has its own interests to look out for in the region. In 2019, the French defence ministry released a policy report, “France and Security in the Indo-Pacific” recalling that around 1.5 million French nationals live between Djibouti in the Horn of Africa and the overseas territory of French Polynesia. This means that Paris views its Indo-Pacific zone as stretching from the Gulf of Aden to beyond Australia.

In other words, Paris’ mission to the Indo-Pacific is a continuation of its colonial injustices in the region in past centuries, pursuing everything and openly for itself and its own sense of hegemony, that it, London and Washington are accusing Beijing of.

The West’s failing fortunes across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia will not benefit from their collective economies and armed forces being stretched further still to confront an Asian nation in Asia, and one that is poised to surpass them all economically and militarily in short order.

For Beijing’s part, it has successfully reached this point through careful and patient planning, strategy and diplomacy. It will be very unlikely that Beijing will find itself drawn into a conflict with the West and will instead continue building ties within the region, particularly with Southeast Asia, creating its own regional order, and one built on economic cooperation rather than military confrontation, a process already well under way and why Washington feels the need to recruit Western European nations for its “Indo-Pacific” strategy in the first place.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post

EDITED AND HOSTED BY THE GREANVILLE POST

Police violence is routine as they deal with youths in the banlieues, asylum seekers, and Yellow Vests. The solution according to Macron? Ban the publishing of images of the officers, so no one can see. It’s the act of a despot. 

The French government has stepped into a pile of steaming merde with its push to ban the publication of images of police on duty in the name of protecting the officers from harm, but it’s really for a far more sinister motive.

If it passes, the controversial legislation would mean up to a year in prison and a €45,000 fine for those “broadcasting, by any means and through any medium, with the intention of causing physical or psychological harm, an image of the face or any other element to identify a police officer”.

The question to be asked is not how to protect those who are meant to be protecting French citizens – it’s why they feel the need for a media blackout while they go about their role.

Not everyone buys the claim from Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin that the new law was necessary because police officers “are under constant threat in their personal lives” after being identified, and because there are “calls for female officers to be raped”.

Even if we accept this as a contributing factor, it is not the full reason for the move. We have to look back only to the start of the year to find a more obvious explanation. The weekly battles between gilet jaune (Yellow Vest) protesters and the police made for uncomfortable viewing on television and across social media.

More than 200 separate complaints of police brutality in 2019 alone were being investigated, and videos went viral of heavily armed officers beating demonstrators and even firing rubber bullets at them from point-blank range as they fought pitched battles.

---

BELOW: A French Gilet Jaune gets hit by canister in the eye while talking to fellow demonstrators. Chilean and Israeli police employ similar tactics. 

⚠️ Image très violente !!! Blessure à l'oeil un commentaire @CCastaner @prefpolice #PlaceItalie #16Novembre #Acte53 #Paris #GiletsJaunes #Manu #1AnDeColère Mais on imagine que #IGPN va pas réussir a identifier le tireur et ce sera classé sans suite ... pic.twitter.com/HGuJjwydzS

— Altra Énervé #OnOublieraPas #SoigneEtTaisToi (@AltraMale) November 17, 2019

What the police couldn’t do, the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing lockdown did manage: putting on hold the gilets jaunes’ campaign.

Having viral videos of police brutality thrust under his nose, President Macron declared in January, “I expect the highest ethical standards from our police officers. I have asked the interior minister to make some proposals in this regard.”

Now we know what he had in mind.

Because, in the lull of that storm, Macron’s government has identified an opportunity to make it that much more difficult for future protestations of overzealous policing to be successfully documented.

As the philosophers might have it, ‘If a demonstrator falls on a street after being beaten by a police officer, and there’s nobody around to film it, does it make a sound?’

Post-pandemic, the return of the gilets jaunes protests is a certainty – there have already been signs of an encore – and, having spent most of 2020 living under draconian restrictions, when the protesters do re-emerge in force, they will be re-invigorated and more determined than ever to show l’Empereur Macron how damned furious they are with him, his government, the handling of the pandemic, and the direction the Republic is heading.

But if the president thinks the best way to deal with that pent-up fury is to have police operating in the shadows, locking up anyone who dares to try to film or photograph them, then no one should be surprised when it turns into an uncontrollable volcano of social media videos and citizen journalism that portrays the excesses of the law in a particularly unflattering light.

---

Leading French magazine L'Express ran a story about Gilets Jaunes demanding justice for their wounds at the hands of police. They define themselves as "les mutilés pour l'example"—the wounded as an example to others—a cold-blooded government tactic designed to dampen street protests.

 

And it’s not just the gilets jaunes with whom the police face difficulty.

Videos of their clumsy brutality and panic in the face of unrest among young, disaffected immigrants in the banlieues do not show a tolerant society at ease with itself, but a nation beset by cultural divisions that seem to be widening ever further in the face of increasing violence.

Then there are the frequent and forcible evictions of illegal migrants from the makeshift camps set up in the suburbs of northern Paris, near Calais and elsewhere. Police routinely resort to tear gas to break up the camps and, just yesterday, fired canisters into a crowd of 2,000 illegal migrants from conflict zones in Somalia and Afghanistan, who had made temporary shelter on land adjacent to the national football stadium, the Stade de France.

Firing tear gas into crowds of unarmed asylum seekers is not what anyone would call an edifying spectacle.

Yet all these confrontations with the police – the gilets jaunes protests, the young migrant gangs throwing bottles and rocks, and the desperate asylum seekers forcibly evicted from their miserable camps – when caught on film and photo to be shared with the rest of the world in the blink of an eye, display a side of France that the government would prefer was not on show.

The country has also had a couple of high-profile race cases involving the deaths of young migrant men while in police custody. In January, Cédric Chouviat, a delivery driver in Paris, suffered a heart attack and died after police put him in a chokehold. Back in 2016, Adama Traoré died while handcuffed in the back of a police van.

Neither of these deaths were caught on film, but just one passerby with a smartphone could turn the next incident into France’s very own ‘George Floyd’ moment. And that would surely set things off, because that was where the mood was heading during protests demanding answers in both cases.

With social tumult raging across France and police brutality persisting – both a cause and effect – it can be only a matter of time before social media catches alight with yet another brutal spectacle

Macron knows this, and the legislation now under consideration is clearly his reaction. He might be attempting to sell it as a means of protecting the police – winning the support of their unions in the process, in a strategic move to help his next presidential campaign in less than 18 months.

But everyone knows, in France and abroad, that this is really a calculated attack on press freedom and the public’s right to know what the police who supposedly serve them and are paid by them, get up to. All so the government can go about its dirty work without fear of censure.It is the action of a totalitarian, not a democrat – a cynical attack on liberté that must be stopped.

Damian Wilson is a UK journalist, ex-Fleet Street editor, financial industry consultant and political communications special advisor in the UK and EU.

Published at www.rt.com

EDITED AND HOSTED BY THE GREANVILLE POST

The Modi government has earned the distinction as the “first non-western” voice to come out in support of French President Emmanuel Macron over the recent horrific killings in that country. This distinction apparently presents itself as too good to miss. The Rajya Sabha TV slotted a programme to castigate “Islamist terrorism” in France. 
Religious fundamentalism is repugnant. Indians should know it better than anybody, and what is happening in France is not difficult to understand. The French condition bears striking resemblance to India’s widespread social pathology. 

Islamophobia is on surge in French society, too. The thinly-veiled anti-Muslim statements, barbs and innuendos by senior French ministers are a daily occurrence. If assailants stabbed two Muslim women wearing veil near the Eiffel Tower, it no longer makes news. Patently anti-Muslim attitudes give respectability to Islamophobia and fuel social tensions, as France is also a multi-ethnic society like India. 

The Pew Research Center found in their Global Attitudes Survey in 2017 that 54.2% of the French regarded themselves as Christians, with 47.4% belonging to the Catholic Church. Islam is the second-most widely professed religion in France. Christians number roughly 38 million while Muslims account for close to 5.5 million. [Around 21 million French people do not have affiliation with any religion.] 

However, although Christianity is the most represented religion in France, there is deep disquiet in the Christian mind bordering on paranoia that feeds into Islamophobia. In democracies, it is a special responsibility for trade unions, churches, local newspapers and other public institutions to help foster social cohesion and promote civic participation and incubate the sense of responsibilities of citizenship, but that is not happening in France. 

Social tensions are also exacerbated due to the uneven growth and yawning social inequalities. The Internet significantly contributes to the radicalisation of society. Most important, in the most recent decades, there has been an overall weakening of the national ideology of secularism. France’s political and intellectual traditions have weakened.  

Enter Macron. Just a few days before the current mayhem, on October 2, in a long-awaited national address, Macron unveiled a plan to defend France’s secular values against what he termed “Islamist radicalism.” 

“Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today, we are not just seeing this in our country,” Macron said. His core theme was that his government will make “no concessions” in a new drive to push religion out of education and the public sector in France. 

He announced that the government would present a bill in December to strengthen a 1905 law that officially separated church and state in France. The new measures, Macron said, are aimed at addressing a problem of growing “radicalisation” in France and improving “our ability to live together”. 

This may seem a fine thing to do in the best traditions of separation of the state and religion. But the devil lies in the detail. Thus, while “secularism is the cement of a united France,” and Macron’s new law permits people to belong to any faith of their choosing, the outward displays of religious affiliation would be banned in schools and the public service! (By the way, wearing the hijab is already banned in French schools and for public servants at their workplace.) 

Macron claimed he is seeking to “liberate” Islam in France from foreign influences by improving oversight of mosque financing. There would also be closer scrutiny of schools and associations exclusively serving religious communities. In effect, Macron announced that France is once again evaluating its relationship with its Muslim minority, the largest in Europe. 

Macron’s remarks produced a furious reaction in the Muslim community. A prominent French Muslim activist tweeted: “The repression of Muslims has been a threat, now it is a promise. In a one hour speech Macron emboldened the far right, anti-Muslim leftists and threatened the lives of Muslim students by calling for drastic limits on home schooling despite a global pandemic.” 

Macron was speaking one week after a man attacked two people with a meat cleaver outside the former Paris offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly, an assault condemned by the government as an act of “Islamist terrorism”! 

What is Macron up to? In a nutshell, Macron is a besieged politician today. His electorate is abandoning him and he thinks he can save his political career by taking a page out of the far right’s playbook. Macron has failed to deliver on his promises, especially on the economy. Rampant street protests and major public sector strikes show that disaffection is growing exponentially. The so-called Gilets Jaunes (yellow vests) protests highlighted the depth of alienation. Macron has to order force to quell the protests.   

Major demonstrations erupted through last year against pension reforms, fuel-price hikes, police violence, and unemployment. The year ended with one of the longest public transportation strikes in French history, which paralysed the country. 

The upheaval has halved Macron’s ratings from approximately 60 percent in 2017 when he got elected as president. In the last municipal elections in June, his party suffered a crushing defeat. Macron is getting frantic, as the presidential election in April 2022 draws closer. 

Fanning the flames of Islamophobia is a desperate attempt by Macron at gaining political ground —- specifically, at the expense of the far right. Macron estimates that Islamophobia holds the key to galvanise the supporters of the far right. 

Macron is succeeding. A chorus of media pundits and politicians across the political spectrum has lately united in the conviction that French “values” are under threat and that the general population needs to mobilise for a fight. 

The mood is captured in a tweet by a senior politician Meyer Habib, deputy chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee at the National Assembly — “To arms, citizens”, using an evocative phrase from the French national anthem. 

The air is thick with highly provocative demands — that this “war” should include the rescinding of citizenship for Muslim migrants, obligation to adopt French first names, reinstatement of death penalty, etc. 

Now, the belligerent rhetoric has also put on the defensive Macron’s main political opponent in the presidential election, the socialist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, head of the France Insoumise (Unbowed France) party, against whom a smear campaign has begun for voicing disquiet over the stigmatisation of Muslims in the French society. 

In an attempt to undermine the Left by associating it with “Islamism”, which has a very negative connotation in the minds of the French majority, Mélenchon has been branded as an “Islamo-leftist”. This character assassination campaign may work to Macron’s advantage. 

But to be fair to Macron, he is only riding a popular wave, since for well over two decades, the French state has been moving in a vicious circle in its relationship with its Muslim citizens. Ali Saad, noted French sociologist and media critic focusing on the influence of mass media, wrote recently,

“The [French] state still does not acknowledge the fact that Islam is a religion of France, that it is not wise to systematically remind or refer to French Muslims by their racial or geographic origins, and that French Muslim issues are inherently French issues.

“The state does not want to recognise the fact that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that religion is a primary motivator for violent extremism and that radicalisation is a social phenomenon… The state has done little to address job and housing discrimination, police brutality, poverty and everyday racism and yet it accuses the French Muslim community of failing to “integrate” or even of “separatism”. It has relied on a security-centred approach in which Islam has been systematically perceived as an evil that society should confront, and Muslims as a threat to the way of life and to fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression.” 

In a nutshell, the French state has separated itself from the Muslim segment of the population and is insisting on treating them as outsiders. There is refusal to acknowledge that multiculturalism is innate to plural societies and should be embraced as such. (This is where Britain puts France to shame.) 

All in all, the Modi government shouldn’t have popped up as a flag carrier in the barricades where Macron has positioned himself. It draws attention needlessly to India’s deep-rooted malaise. It is sheer naiveté to assume that the crisis in France is over the the “French version of absolute liberty” (whatever that may mean.)  

This is a familiar Indian sight: a discredited politician taking a plausible route to stage a comeback and get re-elected — and that too, in the chaotic times of the pandemic. Inability to see Macron for the cowardly politics he practises makes us apologists for bigotry.

* * *

Feel free to distribute (Plus on est de fous...)