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originally posted by: scraedtosleep
I for one think the yellow vests are in greater number though I honestly haven't figured out what they really want.
Since 17 November, from the smallest village, from the rural world to the largest city, we have risen up against this deeply violent, unjust and unbearable society. We won’t let it happen again! We revolt against high cost of living, insecurity and poverty. We want our loved ones, our families and our children to live in dignity.
It is for all these rights that we occupy roundabouts every day, that we organise actions and demonstrations, and that we debate everywhere. With our yellow vests, we are taking the floor, we who never have it.
And what is the government’s response? Repression, contempt, denigration; deaths and thousands of wounded, the massive use of firearms that mutilate, blind, injure and traumatise. More than 1,000 people have been arbitrarily sentenced and imprisoned. And now the new so-called “anti-hooligan” law aims simply to prevent us from demonstrating.
And what a dirty trick this great national debate is, which is in fact a government public relations campaign, which exploitsour will to debate and decide! We practice true democracy in our assemblies and on our roundabouts, not on the TV or at the pseudo- round tables organised by Macron.
After insulting us and treating us to less than nothing, he is now presenting us as a Fascist and xenophobic hate mob. But we are quite the opposite: neither racist, nor sexist, nor homophobic, we are proud to be together, with our differences, to build a supportive society.
We are strong in the diversity of our discussions; at this very moment hundreds of assemblies are elaborating and proposing their own demands. They concern real democracy, social and fiscal justice, working conditions, environmental and climate justice, and the end of discrimination. Among the most debated strategic demands and proposals, we find: the eradication of poverty in all its forms, the transformation of institutions (referenda, end of the privileges of elected officials…), ecological transition
France Profonde is coming together and is finding its own meanings and social power and they are doing this by being with each other in action together. It is they who are getting stronger, weekend by weekend and the paralysed state which is diminishing, off-guardian.org...
originally posted by: XAnarchistX
Most of the UK based Yellow Vests are Nationalists and far-rightists though
originally posted by: Kester
a reply to: scraedtosleep
Can't find any drone footage. Losing internet access now. See you on the streets.
www.thelandmagazine.org.uk...
Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain's land has been privatized — that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals. Currently, in our "property-owning democracy", nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population,1 while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line.
There are many factors that have led to such extreme levels of land concentration, but the most blatant and the most contentious has been enclosure — the subdivision and fencing of common land into individual plots which were allocated to those people deemed to have held rights to the land enclosed. For over 500 years, pamphleteers, politicians and historians have argued about enclosure, those in favour (including the beneficiaries) insisting that it was necessary for economic development or "improvement", and those against (including the dispossessed) claiming that it deprived the poor of their livelihoods and led to rural depopulation.
. . . funnier if the protestors all wore black boots, combat trousers, and jackets under their high-viz vests as well, maybe fake handcuffs hanging from their sides and black baseball caps with "POLITE" on a police style badge . . . i'd join a protest like that just for the laugh.
. . . call the group "the polite force" . . . to make everyone polite and nice to each other . . .
The Creation of a Police State - Macron Sanctions Savage Crack Down on Civilian Protestors
The GJ movement has taken France by storm since its sudden appearance after the increasingly unpopular President Emmanuel Macron introduced a number of measures that appeared to protect the French wealthy elite while penalising those already on the brink of poverty. The increase in the fuel tax was the final straw that broke the back of the already pressurized population struggling to make ends meet every month.
French state weapons of mass mutilation
“sub-lethal” LBD40 bullet launcher that is being liberally used by security forces during GJ protests across France. The LBD40 is the evolution of the notorious “flashball bullet,” 10 times the velocity of a paintball. The modern LBD40 launcher is a very accurate instrument with a “red-dot” laser pointer sight that ensures pinpoint targeting of civilians.
All classes, all backgrounds, all ethnicities unified in rejection of the erosion of their civil liberties and threat to their constitutional right to protest the perceived transformation of the French state into a repressive plutocracy.
and Macron and his controllers and cronies are incensed.
One GJ demand has pierced the heart of the globalist movement: the referendum or direct democracy. The demand is for a designated substantial number of signatories to determine the right to call a referendum on specific issues. As author Diana Johnstone points out, “the right to a CIR [Citizens Initiated Referendum] exists in Switzerland, Italy and California.” This proposal threatens to wrest power away from those who have a monopoly over it and who make decisions for their populations that serve their own interests not those of the “little people.” It will send shivers down the spine of neoliberalism and globalism.
President Macron has decided “not to change course”. With no regard for the sufferings and expectations of working men and women, his Government is tightening up its neoliberal policies and, to that end, going ever further down the route of social violence and police repression. The record is horrific, unworthy of a country that claims to be democratic and tolerant. Since the start of the yellow vest movement, there have been 11 accidental deaths. More than 2,000 people have been injured, at least a hundred of them very seriously, with doctors reporting injuries they describe as “war wounds” (hands torn off, eyes put out, disfigurement, multiple fractures and maiming), mainly resulting from baton rounds or shrapnel from grenades, in many cases fired at peaceful protesters. Several people are still in a coma. And what of the psychological shock to teenagers treated as terrorists by the police, forced onto their knees with their hands behind their head, or bundled into vans or cells?
www.defenddemocracy.press...
The mother of all violence, the violence that has to be halted first of all and as a matter of urgency, the violence from which people are forced to defend themselves – as suggested by the Declaration of Human and Citizens’ Rights in the preamble to the French Constitution – is that generated by the imposition of unjust, merciless, antisocial and undemocratic neoliberal measures; the violence that, in the silence surrounding the price movements of capitalist markets, causes homeless people to die of cold, pushes indebted farmers to suicide and destroys individuals and families by depriving them of jobs, cutting off their electricity and evicting them from their homes; the violence that forces pensioners to turn off the heating because they can’t afford it, or children to skip a meal; the violence that breaks down all solidarity, closes schools, maternity wards and psychiatric hospitals, plunges small tradesmen and craftsmen into despair as they buckle under their overheads, wears out wage workers but does not let them make ends meet. The real violence is there, in this extraordinarily unjust and fundamentally untenable system. In that light, the smashing of bank or supermarket windows by a few isolated or confused individuals, while certainly reprehensible, is no justification for police violence
www.defenddemocracy.press...