The french disturbances are not yet riots, they don't engage in open clashes with the police. They don't even come close to the activities I was involved in when we defied the police in Dortmund, Frankfurt, Bonn and Rome and occupied the town hall, tore out (historic!) cobbles stones from the streets, built barricades, smashed shop windows and invaded the food sections to grab bottles and cans to be used as objects to throw at the police. We went through the classic mano a mano exercise, garnered with clouds of tear gas, police sirens, burning trash containers, flying stones, shattering glass, quaky bullhorn commands, the attack and retreat tactics to 'hold the ground', grizzly water cannons, soaked parkas, burning eyes, police arrests and (the joy) of liberating comrades from police vans, the monotonous tak-tak-tak sound of the rotors of helicopters above the square - all the chaos and emotions of a serious street fight.
Nothing of that happens now in France. Again: The kids don't engage in frontal clashes with the police.
And what makes it different to the riots in the US and what happened two weeks ago in the UK:
As the song says: A working class heroe is something to be.
And it makes for good stories to tell your kids. "The USA appears destined by fate to plague America with misery in the name of liberty." Simon Bolivar, Caracas, 1819
Daddy, tell me again
Daddy, tell me again that beautiful story of gendarmes and fascists, and students with long bangs and sweet urban guerrilla in bell-bottom trousers, and Rolling's songs, and girls in miniskirts.
Daddy, tell me again all the fun you had spoiling old age for rusted dictators, and how you sang Al Vent and occupied the Sorbonne during that French May in the days of wine and roses.
Daddy, tell me again that beautiful story of that crazy guerrillero they killed in Bolivia, and whose rifle nobody dared to pick up again, and how since that day everything seems uglier.
Daddy, tell me again that after so many barricades and after so many risen fists and so much spilt blood, at the end of the game you were not able to do anything, and under the cobblestones there was no beach sand.
It was a hard defeat: all that was dreamt of rotted in the corners, was covered with cobwebs, and nobody sang Al Vent any more, there are no more crazies, not more pariahs, but it needs to rain as the square is still filthy.
That May is far away, far away is that Saint-Denis, how far Jean-Paul Sartre is, that Paris is very far, however sometimes I think that in the end it was all the same: blows keep striking those who speak too much.
And the same dead remain rotten by cruelty. Now they are dying in Bosnia, those who used to die in Vietnam. guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper
It is true, as I note above, that the amount of damage - to property and in terms of human carnage - is much less than one saw in riots like 1992 LA.
