In praise of the French
The past week's astonishing wave of demonstrations in France only proves again something I have believed since 1995 (which was the last time that anything on the scale of the present demonstrations occurred in France): the French are the only people on the planet vigilant enough to deserve democracy. Almost everywhere else, apathy rules. In all the English-speaking countries, so-called 'reforms' have eroded wages and living conditions more or less continuously since the late 1970s. Hardly anyone has ever felt bothered to do something about it. Only in France, it seems, are people sufficiently motivated to take on their governments.
When you think about it, the rest of us are totally bloody pathetic. Here in Australia, in keeping with our reactionary Anglo-Saxon traditions, everyone grumbles every time the government does something to erode our living standards and/or working conditions, but does precisely nothing about it. People screamed blue murder, for instance, about the Howard government's introduction of a General Goods and Services Tax (GST) back in the late '90s, but in the end when the Democrats stabbed the Australian people in the back and the legislation was passed all people felt they could do was grit their teeth and bear it. In New Zealand and Ireland, on the other hand, they commit suicide (suicide rates rose dramatically in each country during the period of most intense 'reformism'), but suicide statistics have never deterred ideological fanatics from proceeding, like sleepwalkers, on their predetermined course.
In the U.S., at the other extreme, with the exception of the Latinos, who are currently fighting for the rights of illegal immigrants - I'm sorry to take an unpopular standpoint here, but I just don't think that a country has a chance of preserving decent wages and conditions for its workers if allows employers to continuously flood it with cheap immigrant labour - people rant and rave about using their constitutional rights to bear arms to resist oppressive governments - but, of course, they never do. Instead, they use their much vaunted guns to shoot fellow workers in these appalling workplace tragedies that occur there every so often. (So why exactly do so many Americans make such a fuss about how they need guns to resist the government, when all they really want them for is to shoot each other?)
What I most admire about the French is what others would dismiss as 'negativism.' It's true that people protesting the new law don't seem to have any better ideas as to how to reduce youth unemployment. That said, I think no change is better than a change for the worse. In reactionary times, the only thing socialists can do is wage a war of obstruction. The one misgiving I have about the French demonstrations is the concern that they might backfire. If Chirac and Villepin are finally defeated over this, then that may leave the way clear for Sarkozy, who is not a major player in this battle. If Sarkozy was able to capitalize on a Chirac/Villepin backdown, he would surely seek to implement many far more draconian 'reforms,' and would probably do so ruthlessly. There would be blood in the streets, but he would probably think of a few dead bodies as his administration's baptism of fire.
As is usually the case with current events, the best reporting on the French protests comes from the World Socialist Web Site. If you don't check this website daily (no updates on weekends though), you're really missing out. By the way, you don't have to share the website's politics to be suitably impressed. Most of the party's propaganda gets shoved into the last paragraph of each story: the rest is just excellent reporting and analysis, the sort that, in a genuinely democratic society, we'd be getting from mainstream outlets all the time.
TIRADE FOR THE DAY: In the course of a reasonable defence of the French protests, Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research explains that the Great Neoliberal Desideratum, labour market flexibility, is not necessarily linked to low unemployment rates. He then writes, 'Why then is Europe's unemployment currently higher (8.4 percent for the high-income countries of Europe) than that of the United States (4.8 percent)? One possibility is that the European Central Bank (ECB) has kept interest rates higher than it should have in recent years. ...' (SOURCE)
When will Weisbrot stop promoting the hoary old myth of high European unemployment? For a rebuttal of this kind of nonsense, which is based upon rock solid faith in the veracity of the U.S.'s official statistics, however improbable (and there are very few people who really think the U.S. rate is as low as 4.8 percent), see James Paterson, "Deconstructing the 'European unemployment dilemma': A case study in the manipulation of statistics and conceptual models in the discourse of 'Eurosclerosis'" (pdf here).
HUMOUR: Tourism Australia has objected to Daniel Ilic's spoof of its "Where the bloody hell are you?" TV advertising campaign. According to the Sydney Morning Herald : "A comedy writer has been forced to take down an online spoof of the controversial "where the bloody hell are you" TV ad after legal threats. "Dan Ilic, 24, produced a parody of the ad, changing the jingle to "Where the f---ing hell are you?" and inserting negative images of Australian life. The video was viewed about 30,000 times on video website youtube.com. However, Mr Ilac removed it from his website, Downwind Media, after complaints from Tourism Australia, which last week described the ad as "mean spirited and humourless".'
It's actually pretty funny, and shows how Aussies, like the other Anglo-Saxon peoples, continue to sanitize their own images, in this case for the tourist buck, while doing everything possible to demonize immigrants and Muslims. See it here.
