Category: France

  • Leslie Amine (Benin), Swamp, 2022

    In 1958, the poet and trade union leader Abdoulaye Mamani of Zinder (Niger) won an election in his home region against Hamani Diori, one of the founders of the Nigerien Progressive Party. This election result posed a problem for French colonial authorities, who wanted Diori to lead the new Niger. Mamani stood as a candidate for Niger’s left-wing Sawaba party, which was one of the leading forces in the independence movement against France. Sawaba was the party of the talakawa, the ‘commoners’, or the petit peuple (‘little folk’), the party of peasants and workers who wanted Niger to realise their hopes. The word ‘sawaba’ is related to the Hausa word ‘sawki’, meaning to be relieved or to be delivered from misery.

    The election result was ultimately annulled, and Mamani decided not to run again because he knew that the die was cast against him. Diori won the re-election and became Niger’s first president in 1960.

    Sawaba was banned by authorities in 1959, and Mamani went into exile in Ghana, Mali, and then Algeria. ‘Let us shatter resignation’, he wrote in his poem Espoir (‘Hope’). Mamani came home following Niger’s return to democracy in 1991. In 1993, Niger held its first multi-party election since 1960. The recently re-founded Sawaba won only two seats. That same year, Mamani died in a car accident. The hope of a generation that wanted to break free from France’s neocolonial grip on the country is expressed in Mamani’s stunning line let us shatter resignation.

    Yancouba Badji (Niger), Départ pour la route clandestine d’Agadez (Niger) vers la Libye (‘Departure for the Clandestine Route From Agadez (Niger) to Libya’), n.d.

    Niger is at the centre of Africa’s Sahel, the region at the south of the Sahara Desert. Most countries of the Sahel had been under French rule for almost a century before they emerged from direct colonialism in 1960, only to slip into a neocolonial structure that largely remains in place today. Around the time when Mamani returned home from Algeria, Alpha Oumar Konaré, a Marxist and former student leader, won the presidency in Mali. Like Niger, Mali was burdened with criminal debt ($3 billion), much of it driven up during military rule. Sixty percent of Mali’s fiscal receipts went toward debt servicing, meaning that Konaré had no chance to build an alternative agenda. When Konaré asked the United States to help Mali with this permanent debt crisis, George Moose, the US assistant secretary of state for African affairs during President Bill Clinton’s administration, replied by saying ‘virtue is its own reward’. In other words, Mali had to pay the debt. Konaré left office in 2002 bewildered. The entire Sahel was submerged in unpayable debt while multinational corporations reaped profits from its precious raw materials.

    Each time the people of the Sahel rise, they have been struck down. This was the fate of Mali’s President Modibo Keïta, overthrown and jailed until his death in 1977, and the great president of Burkina Faso Thomas Sankara, assassinated in 1987. It is the sentence that has been levied against the people of the entire region. Now, Niger is once again moving in a direction that France and other Western countries do not like. They want neighbouring African countries to send in their militaries to bring ‘order’ to Niger. To explain what is happening in Niger and across the Sahel region, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the International Peoples’ Assembly present red alert no. 17, No Military Intervention against Niger, which makes up the remainder of this newsletter and can be downloaded here.

    Why is there an increase in anti-French and anti-Western feeling in the Sahel?

    From the mid-nineteenth century, French colonialism has galloped across North, West, and Central Africa. By 1960, France controlled almost five million square kilometres (eight times the size of France itself) in West Africa alone. Though national liberation movements from Senegal to Chad won independence from France that year, the French government maintained financial and monetary control through the African Financial Community or CFA (formerly the colonial French Community of Africa), maintaining the French CFA franc currency in the former West African colonies and forcing the newly independent countries to keep at least half of their foreign exchange reserves in the Banque de France. Sovereignty was not only restricted by these monetary chains: when new projects emerged in the area, they were met by French intervention (spectacularly with the assassination of Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara in 1987). France maintained the neocolonial structures that have allowed French companies to leech the natural resources of the region (such as the uranium from Niger, which powers a third of French light bulbs) and have forced these countries to crush their hopes through an International Monetary Fund-driven debt-austerity agenda.

    The simmering resentment against France escalated after the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) destroyed Libya in 2011 and exported instability across Africa’s Sahel region. A combination of secessionist groups, trans-Saharan smugglers, and al-Qaeda offshoots joined together and marched south of the Sahara to capture nearly two-thirds of Mali, large parts of Burkina Faso, and sections of Niger. French military intervention in the Sahel through Operation Barkhane (2013) and through the creation of the neocolonial G-5 Sahel Project led to an increase in violence by French troops, including against civilians. The IMF debt-austerity project, the Western wars in West Asia, and the destruction of Libya led to a rise in migration across the region. Rather than tackle the roots of the migration, Europe tried to build its southern border in the Sahel through military and foreign policy measures, including by exporting illegal surveillance technologies to the neocolonial governments in this belt of Africa. The cry ‘La France, dégage!’ (‘France, get out!’) defines the attitude of mass unrest in the region against the neocolonial structures that try to strangle the Sahel.

    Wilfried Balima (Burkina Faso), Les trois camarades (‘The Three Comrades’), 2018

    Why are there so many coups in the Sahel?

    Over the course of the past thirty years, politics in the Sahel countries have seriously desiccated. Many parties with a history that traces back to the national liberation movements and even the socialist movements (such as Niger’s Parti Nigérien pour la Démocratie et le Socialisme-Tarayya) have collapsed into being representatives of their elites, who, in turn, are conduits of a Western agenda. The entry of the al-Qaeda-smuggler forces gave the local elites and the West the justification to further squeeze the political environment, reducing already limited trade union freedoms and excising the left from the ranks of established political parties. The issue is not so much that the leaders of the mainstream political parties are ardently right-wing or centre-right, but that whatever their orientation, they have no real independence from the will of Paris and Washington. They have become – to use a word often voiced on the ground – ‘stooges’ of the West.

    Absent any reliable political or democratic instruments, the discarded rural and petty-bourgeois sections of the Sahel countries turn to their urbanised children in the armed forces for leadership. People like Burkina Faso’s Captain Ibrahim Traoré (born in 1988), who was raised in the rural province of Mouhoun and studied geology in Ouagadougou, and Mali’s Colonel Assimi Goïta (born in 1983), who comes from the cattle market town and military redoubt of Kati, represent these broad class fractions. Their communities have been utterly marginalised by the hard austerity programmes of the IMF, the theft of their resources by Western multinationals, and the payments for Western military garrisons in the country. Discarded with no real political platform to speak for them, large sections of the country have rallied behind the patriotic intentions of these young military men, who have themselves been pushed by mass movements – such as trade unions and peasant organisations – in their countries. That is why the coup in Niger is being defended in mass rallies from the capital city of Niamey to the small, remote towns that border Libya. These young leaders do not come to power with a well-worked agenda. However, they have a level of admiration for people like Thomas Sankara: Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso, for instance, sports a red beret like Sankara, speaks with Sankara’s left-wing frankness, and even mimics Sankara’s diction.

    Pathy Tshindele (Democratic Republic of Congo), Sans Titre (‘Untitled’) from the series Power, 2016

    Will there be a pro-Western military intervention to remove the government of Niger?

    Condemnations of the coup in Niger came quickly from the West (particularly France). The new government of Niger, led by a civilian (former finance minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine), told French troops to leave the country and decided to cut uranium exports to France. Neither France nor the United States – which has built the largest drone base in the world in Agadez (Niger) – are keen to directly intervene with their own military forces. In 2021, France and the United States protected their private companies, TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil, in Mozambique by asking the Rwandan army to intervene militarily. In Niger, the West first wanted the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to invade on their behalf, but mass unrest in the ECOWAS member states, including condemnations from trade unions and people’s organisations, stayed the hands of the regional organisation’s ‘peacekeeping forces’. On 19 August of this year, ECOWAS sent a delegation to meet with Niger’s deposed president and with the new government. It has kept its troops on stand-by, warning that it has chosen an undisclosed ‘D-day’ for a military intervention.

    The African Union, which had initially condemned the coup and suspended Niger from all union activity, recently stated that a military intervention should not take place. This statement has not stopped rumours from flying about, such as that Ghana might send its troops into Niger (despite the Presbyterian Church of Ghana’s warning not to intervene and the trade unions’ condemnation of a potential invasion). Neighbouring countries have closed their borders with Niger.

    Meanwhile, the governments of Burkina Faso and Mali, which have sent troops to Niger, have said that any military intervention against the government of Niger will be taken as an invasion of their own countries. There is a serious conversation afoot about the creation of a new federation in the Sahel that includes Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger, which have a combined population of over 85 million. Rumblings amongst the populations from Senegal to Chad suggest that these might not be the last coups in this important belt of the African continent. The growth of platforms such as the West African Peoples Organisation is key to the political advancement in the region.

    Seynihimap (Niger), Untitled, 2006

    On 11 August, Philippe Toyo Noudjènoumè, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Benin, wrote a letter to the president of his country and asked a precise and simple question: whose interests have driven Benin to go to war with Niger to starve its ‘sister’ population? ‘You want to commit the people of Benin to go suffocate the people of Niger for the strategic interests of France’, he continued; ‘I demand that… you refuse to involve our country in any aggressive operation against the sister population of Niger… [and] listen to the voice of our people… for peace, harmony, and the development of the African people’. This is the mood in the region: a boldness to confront the neocolonial structures that have prevented hope. The people want to shatter resignation.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • By Rohit Deo

    The Flying Fijians were defeated by World Rugby Cup hosts France 34-17 in a pre-tournament build-up test in Nantes, France, yesterday.

    The Semi Radradra-captained side scored a try in the first spell through hooker Tevita Ikanivere while flyhalf Caleb Muntz added a conversion and penalty as Fiji trailed the second-string French team 21-10 at the break.

    Radradra, who has been signed up for the French club Lyon, scored Fiji’s lone try of the second spell as France got points on the board through a try and a couple of penalties after the break.

    “It was a tough battle out there for our team, Radradra said after the match.

    “We knew they would come out strong. We made a few mistakes which put the home side on the front foot.”

    Planet Rugby commented: “After the previous matches of the weekend the visit of Fiji to France must have put a smile on the faces of all who watched the game as both teams produced a little crackerjack of a match that saw Les Bleus successfully explore their depth and the Flying Fijians demonstrate they are an outstanding team with ball in hand.”

    Fiji will now play England at Twickenham next Sunday in their last warm-up match before the Rugby World Cup opener against Wales on September 11.

    In other pre-Rugby World Cup matches at the weekend, Ireland defeated England 29-10 while South Africa thrashed Wales 52-16.

    Georgia beat the United States 22-7 and Italy thrashed Romania 57-7.

    Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • A year prior to Italy’s 2022 elections, Giorgia Meloni was invited to join the Aspen Institute, a Washington based strategic think tank with close relations to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Atlantic Council and the military industrial complex: 

    “The Aspen institute is also involved in the arms industry, with links to arms manufacturing giants such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It has typically supported the US’s ‘democracy-defending’ or ‘democracy-propagating, humane and civilized’ wars.”

    Prominent US politicians including Madeleine Albright, Condolezza Rice as well as Victoria Nuland have actively collaborated with the Aspen Institute.

    The Aspen Institute is  generously funded by the Gates Foundation, the Rockefellers, Carnegie and the Ford Foundation, not to mention Goldman Sachs, which over the years has played a key role in the “selection” of Italian politicians.

    It is worth noting that on February 20, 2023, Joe Biden made an unannounced visit to Kiev, meeting up with President Zelensky. And on the following day Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni promptly followed suit, traveling to Kiev to meet up with the corrupt Ukrainian president.

    “She affirmed Italian support for Ukraine and said that her government intends to supply Spada and Skyguard air defence systems to the Ukrainian army”.

    Is Italy’s Prime Minister Meloni an “Instrument”, Political Asset of Washington? The answer is obvious.

    Timeline
    PM Giorgia Meloni Arrives in Washington, July 26, 2023
    PM Meloni had arrived in Washington prior to the Coup d’Etat in Niger (26th of July), i.e. a day prior to the Biden-Meloni meeting in the Oval Office.

    There was no White House record of a discussion or exchange pertaining to the crisis in Niger.

    Bloomberg in a July 26, 2023 report confirmed that private conversations had already been scheduled:

    One suspects that in addition to China, the Niger Coup d’Etat was also discussed behind closed doors, –e.g. with Victoria Nuland and Christina Segal Knowles.

    27 July 2023: PM Meloni meets President Biden in the Oval Office.

    Rome aligns with Washington implying an almost unconditional stance with respect to the war in Ukraine: 

    “Ukraine (and Italy’s new voice). PM Meloni and President Biden reiterated their support for Ukraine against Russia’s war of aggression and vowed to “provide political, military, financial, and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine for as long as it takes, with the aim to reach a just and lasting peace.” Later, at the presser, the Italian leader noted that Rome’s posture on the conflict “is extremely respected and held in high regard” by the US.

    Oval Office 

    PRESIDENT BIDEN: “And as NATO Allies, the transatlantic partnership is the cornerstone of our shared security. And the Italian troops are playing a critical role in Europe, in the Mediterranean, and beyond.

    Italy and the United States are also standing strong with Ukraine. And I compliment you on your very strong support in defending against Russian atrocities. …

    PM MELONI: Thank you. I am very pleased to be here today to testify the deep friendship that bonds the United States and Italy.

    … Moreover, after the Russian aggression against Ukraine, for all together we decided to defend the international law. And I’m proud that Italy, from the beginning, played its part in it. We did it simply because supporting Ukraine means defending the peaceful coexistence of people and states everywhere in the world.”

    PM Meloni also (unconditionally) endorsed Washington’s stance pertaining to Africa, which broadly consists in “dollarizing” the entire continent (including francophone Africa) while concurrently imposing IMF-World Bank “strong economic medicine”.

    PM MELONI: … And on the other hand, we also need to be fair with nations that feel they have been exploited of their resources and that they show distrust towards the West. President Biden knows I take care a lot about Africa, about the role that we can play in these countries that can help us, building with them a new relation based on a new approach, which is a peer-to-peer approach. Also to fight illegal migration and all the problems that we face. It’s all things that we will discuss in the G7 presidency of Italy next year.

    Among those present in the Oval Office on July 27, 2023 were: Victoria Nuland, Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs, and National Security Council Director for International Economics, Christina Segal-Knowles.

    Victoria Nuland Travels to Niamey, August 7, 2023

    Victoria Nuland arrived in Niger on August 7, 2023 on an unannounced visit in the immediate wake of the coup d’Etat.

    Nuland did not meet General Abdourahamane Tiani who had been declared head of the ruling military Junta on July 28, 2023.

    It is worth noting that Tiani studied in Washington D.C at the National Defense University’s (NDU) College of International Security Affairs (CISA). CISA is the U.S. Department of Defense’s  “flagship for education and building of partner capacity in combating terrorism, irregular warfare, and integrated deterrence at the strategic level.”

    Nuland’s meetings were with a team led by General Barmou.

    “The Secretary asked me to make this trip – as you may know, I was in the neighborhood last week and then in Jeddah – because we wanted to speak frankly to the people responsible to this challenge to the democratic order to see if we could try to resolve these issues diplomatically, if we could get some negotiations going, …

    And then we met with the self-proclaimed chief of defense of this operation, General Barmou, and three of the colonels supporting him.  I will say that these conversations were extremely frank and at times quite difficult because, again, we were pushing for a negotiated solution.”  (emphasis added)

    Tacitly acknowledged by Nuland, both General Abdourahamane Tiani and General Barmou in terms of their military profile and background are “friends of America”. Barmou also undertook his military training in the U.S. at Fort Moore, Columbus, Georgia and at the National Defense University (ND) which operates under the Guidance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Barmou also collaborated with U.S. Special Forces. In the words of the Wall Street Journal:

    “At Center of Niger’s Coup Is One of America’s Favorite Generals: Brig. Gen. Moussa Salaou Barmou, long courted by Washington as a partner against Islamist extremism, has emerged as the main diplomatic channel between the U.S. and the junta (emphasis added)

    “Speaking during a question and answer session [August 8 report],  Victoria Nuland, confirmed in so many words that the Coup d’Etat was undertaken on behalf of the U.S.: 

    “With regard to the – to us, interestingly, General Barmou, former Colonel Barmou, is somebody who has worked very closely with U.S. Special Forces over many, many years.”

    Ms Nuland stated this following a crucial first meeting of U.S. officials with members of the military junta in Niger in a significant diplomatic push to restore democratic rule to the country.

    Ms Nuland said the U.S. was pushing for a negotiated solution in Niger and went “through in considerable detail the risks to aspects of our cooperation that he has historically cared about a lot.”

    “So we are hopeful that that will sink in,” added the U.S. undersecretary.

    While noting several regional meetings are going on to negotiate with coupists to release President Mohamed Bazoum and step aside, Ms Nuland said the U.S. would continue to watch closely with allies and partners needed to make the negotiations successful.

    “If there is a desire on the part of the people who are responsible for this to return to constitutional order, we are prepared to help with that. We are prepared to help address concerns on all sides,” Ms Nuland stated. (emphasis added)

    Let us be under no illusions, The architects of the coup “against the democratically elected government of Mr Bazoum” were acting on behalf and in coordination with Washington.

    According to a carefully researched article by Nick Nurse, “At Least Five Members of Niger Junta Were Trained by the US”.

    The unspoken objective is “Paris out of Africa.”

    Our Message to the People of Africa:

    While “France never stopped looting Africa, now the tables are turning”, in favor of the most oppressive and tyrannical form of US. neocolonialism, which must be forcefully opposed. 

    Niger “Regime Change” on Behalf of Uncle Sam. “Paris Out of Africa”

    Washington’s unspoken foreign policy objective is to remove France from Africa.

    Niger is strategic. It produces 5% of the global supply of uranium, which is in part exported to France for use in its nuclear energy facilities.

     

    USAFRICOM has a military base in Niger. The US military has been routinely collaborating with their Nigerien counterparts

    The unspoken objective of Victoria Nuland’s mission was to ultimately to “negotiate”, of course unofficially Niamey’s “alignment” with Washington against Paris:

    “The United States flies drones out of a base in the country’s arid heartland. French peacekeepers, effectively chased out of Mali, withdrew to outposts in Niger last year. Now, their status [France] and role in a country run by the junta’s transitional regime remains up in the air.” (WP, August 9, 2023, emphasis added)

    “Divide and Rule”: Propaganda Against France’s President François Macron

    Amply documented, Wall Street and the Financial Establishment, in liaison with the White House controls several (corrupt) European heads of State and heads of government, including Germany’s Chancellor Scholz, France’s President Macron, Italy’s Prime Minister Meloni and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von Der Leyen, among others.

    The US is at war with both Europe and Africa. It’s an act of economic warfare. Washington is also quite deliberately creating political divisions within the European Union.

    With regard to both Ukraine and Africa, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is aligned with Washington. Despite her fake humanitarian rhetoric, she has casually endorsed America’s hegemonic agenda in Africa, including the dollarization of the entire continent:

    PM Meloni: “President Biden knows I take care a lot about Africa, about the role that we can play in these countries that can help us.”

    Washington is currently involved in a “soft coup” against French colonialism, coupled with a smear campaign (with the support of PM Meloni) against France’s president Macron. 

    In the video below, which was recently released, Italy’s PM Meloni rightfully focusses on the exploitation of child labourers in Burkina Faso’ gold industry, while casually placing the blame on France’s President Macron for the payments system in CFA francs coordinated by the French Treasury.

    What she fails to mention is that the gold industry in Burkina Faso is “dollarized” and controlled primarily by Canadian mining companies. See also here. There is not a single French colonial company involved in gold mining.

    Video: “You Messed Up Macron”

    Annex
    A Brief Note on the History of U.S.- France Relations 

    There is a long history of US-France relations going back the Louisiana purchase (1803), The Monroe Doctrine (1823),  the  Berlin Conference (1884-1885) organized by Germany’s Chancellor Otto van Bismarck. The U.S was politely excluded from participating in the colonial scramble for Africa. (Most of those former colonial powers have been progressively shoved out of Africa, starting in the 1970s).

    The Wars against Indochina and Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos (1946-1975), Charles de Gaulle “Pulls the Plug on NATO” (1966-67), NATO Headquarters move from Paris to Brussels (1967).

    Since the early 1990s, Washington has extended its sphere of influence: the entire African continent is currently in the stranglehold of a dollar denominated debt which has led to mass poverty, not to mention the imposition of “strong economic medicine”  by the IMF-World Bank. The U.S has numerous military bases throughout the continent.

    There are many other dimensions. Washington’s current objective is to eventually eliminate “francophone countries” and exclude France from the African Continent.

    Rwanda in 1990 is the model. The president of Rwanda Juvenal Habyarimana dies in an air crash. A former Belgian colony largely within the political sphere of influence of France was from one year to the next  transformed into a de facto English speaking colony dominated by the U.S, French was eventually scrapped as an official language. Major General Kagame –(who subsequently became Vice-President and then President) was instrumental in leading the military invasion from Uganda. He does not speak a word of French.

    The civil war in Rwanda and the ethnic massacres were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives.

    Major General Paul Kagame had been head of military intelligence in the Ugandan Armed Forces; he had been trained at the U.S. Army Command and Staff College (CGSC) in Leavenworth, Kansas which focuses on warfighting and military strategy. Kagame returned from Leavenworth to lead the RPA, shortly after the 1990 invasion.

    Prior to the outbreak of the Rwandan civil war, the RPA was part of the Ugandan Armed Forces. Shortly prior to the October 1990 invasion of Rwanda, military labels were switched. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty, Chapter 7)

    *****

    On a personal note

    In a United Nations mission to Rwanda in 1996-97, the author together with Pierre Galand submitted the following report to the Government of Rwanda:

    • Michel Chossudovsky and Pierre Galand, L’usage de la dette exterieure du Rwanda, la responsabilité des créanciers, mission report, United Nations Development Program and Government of Rwanda, Kigali, 1997.

    We were subsequently advised by Vice President Paul Kagame that the report had to be submitted in English. My  response to Vice President Paul Kagame: “You should have told us that, and we would have drafted the report in English, We suggest that you get it translated”.

  • The original source of this article is Global Research.
  • This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Six refugees from Afghanistan died in the Channel when the boat they were travelling to the UK on capsized. Predictably, the Mail on Sunday ran a suitably horrid front page, while GB News screamed about ‘taxpayer cash’ – and less predictably (but becoming more the norm), the Labour Party under Keir Starmer gave both of them a run for their money.

    Six refugees dead, yet who’s to blame?

    As Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported, on Saturday 12 August, six people died and 61 others were rescued including children. They were mostly from Afghanistan, with some coming from war-torn Sudan.

    A spokesperson for the Utopia56 humanitarian group blamed border “repression” for the tragedy. They told AFP that the difficulty of securing legal passage only:

    increases the dangerousness of crossings and pushes people to take more and more risks to reach England.

    Previously, five people died at sea and four went missing while trying to cross to Britain from France last year. In November 2021, 27 people also died when a boat capsized in the Channel.

    Of course, this is also a Europe-wide problem. As the Canary‘s Afroze Fatima Zaidi recently wrote:

    almost 2,400 refugees have died or gone missing so far in 2023 while trying to reach European shores via the Mediterranean Sea. Moreover, as the BBC reported:

    “The United Nations has registered more than 17,000 deaths and disappearances in the central Mediterranean since 2014, making it the most dangerous migrant crossing in the world”.

    The Tories (and their mates in the corporate media) in the UK are quick to blame anyone except themselves, of course. The Mail on Sunday‘s front page on 13 August was a case in point. It ran with the headline:

    Was French patrol boat to blame for migrant drownings?

    AFP reported that Dover MP Natalie Elphicke blustered that:

    These overcrowded and unseaworthy deathtraps should obviously be stopped by the French authorities from leaving the French coast in the first place.

    It shouldn’t need saying, but as a reminder, people are fleeing Afghanistan because of the mess the UK helped create:

    So, the Tories and the Mail on Sunday‘s responses were predictable. But what of the Labour Party?

    Labour: courting the right

    Sky News interviewed the shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson. Her response to the deaths of six people from Afghanistan? First, blame the Tories:

    And next, say Labour would do everything except open legal routes for refugees to get here by:

    Oh, and she dropped everyone’s favourite right-wing talking point on right-wing GB News – that the asylum system is costing the good-old British taxpayer a “fortune”:

    The same line former Brexit Party MEP Ben Habib used:

    The fact Labour are now sending front-bench members onto GB News says a lot about the kind of voter it wants to attract.

    Colonialist UK: where Ukrainians matter more than Afghans

    Back in the real world, the six people who drowned will likely have families mourning in Afghanistan. It didn’t have to be this way. The government has a resettlement scheme for Afghans in place – yet it has barely let anyone in:

    Compare the six people from Afghanistan the government has resettled with the 10,000 Ukrainians that we accepted a week in May 2022. As LBC host Sangita Myska summed up regarding the Tories detaining refugees on the Bibby Stockholm barge:

    if they were 39 white men from Ukraine walking up that gangplank into that barge, I’m telling you now there would be a hue and cry, the like of which you have never seen.

    As always, at the heart of this story is the underbelly of racism and colonialism that pervades UK society. As the Canary‘s Maryam Jameela previously wrote:

    It’s almost as though people in the UK don’t value and respect the lives of Black and brown people. They merely tolerate us. They don’t value us as human beings; they see us as cockroaches to keep out of the way. Ukrainian people are considered as a whole – their culture, their traditions, their communities. Black and brown people don’t get that luxury. This is because white people only consider fellow white people to have inalienable rights.

    You’d expect the Mail on Sunday and GB News to push these racist, colonialist mindsets. But Labour? Well, that’s where we’re at, now.

    Featured image via GB News – screengrab

    By Steve Topple

  • This story originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch on Aug. 1, 2023. It is shared here under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

    At 3 am on July 26, 2023, the presidential guard detained President Mohamed Bazoum in Niamey, the capital of Niger. Troops, led by Brigadier General Abdourahmane Tchiani closed the country’s borders and declared a curfew. The coup d’état was immediately condemned by the Economic Community of West African States, by the African Union, and by the European Union. Both France and the United States—which have military bases in Niger—said that they were watching the situation closely. A tussle between the Army—which claimed to be pro-Bazoum—and the presidential guard threatened the capital, but it soon fizzled out. On July 27, General Abdou Sidikou Issa of the army released a statement saying that he would accept the situation to “avoid a deadly confrontation between the different forces which… could cause a bloodbath.” Brigadier General Tchiani went on television on July 28 to announce that he was the new president of the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (Conseil National pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie or CNSP).

    The coup in Niger follows similar coups in Mali (August 2020 and May 2021) and Burkina Faso (January 2022 and September 2022), and Guinea (September 2021). Each of these coups was led by military officers angered by the presence of French and US troops and by the permanent economic crises inflicted on their countries. This region of Africa—the Sahel—has faced a cascade of crises: the desiccation of the land due to the climate catastrophe, the rise of Islamic militancy due to the 2011 NATO war in Libya, the increase in smuggling networks to traffic weapons, humans, and drugs across the desert, the appropriation of natural resources—including uranium and gold—by Western companies that have simply not paid adequately for these riches, and the entrenchment of Western military forces through the construction of bases and the operation of these armies with impunity.

    Two days after the coup, the CNSP announced the names of the 10 officers who lead the CNSP. They come from the entire range of the armed forces, from the army (General Mohamed Toumba) to the Air Force (Colonel Major Amadou Abouramane) to the national police (Deputy General Manager Assahaba Ebankawel). It is by now clear that one of the most influential members of the CNSP is General Salifou Mody, former chief of staff of the military and leader in the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy, which led the February 2010 coup against President Mamadou Tandja and which governed Niger until Bazoum’s predecessor Mahamadou Issoufou won the 2011 presidential election. It was during Issoufou’s time in office that the United States government built the world’s largest drone base in Agadez and that the French special forces garrisoned the city of Irlit on behalf of the uranium mining company Orano (formerly a part of Areva).

    It is important to note that General Salifou Mody is perceived as an influential member of CNSP given his influence in the army and his international contacts. On February 28, 2023, Mody met with the United States Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley during the African Chiefs of Defense Conference in Rome to discuss “regional stability, including counterterrorism cooperation and the continued fight against violent extremism in the region.” On March 9, Mody visited Mali to meet with Colonel Assimi Goïta and the Chief of Staff of the Malian army General Oumar Diarra to strengthen military cooperation between Niger and Mali. A few days later on March 16, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Niger to meet with Bazoum. In what many in Niger perceived as a sidelining of Mody, he was appointed on June 1 as the Nigerien ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. Mody, it is said in Niamey, is the voice in the ear of Brigadier General Tchiani, the titular head of state.

    Corruption and the West

    A highly informed source in Niger tells us that the reason why the military moved against Bazoum is that “he’s corrupt, a pawn of France. Nigerians were fed up with him and his gang. They are in the process of arresting the members of the deposed system, who embezzled public funds, many of whom have taken refuge in foreign embassies.” The issue of corruption hangs over Niger, a country with one of the world’s most lucrative uranium deposits. The “corruption” that is talked about in Niger is not about petty bribes by government officials, but about an entire structure—developed during French colonial rule—that prevents Niger from establishing sovereignty over its raw materials and over its development.

    At the heart of the “corruption” is the so-called “joint venture” between Niger and France called Société des mines de l’Aïr (Somaïr), which owns and operates the uranium industry in the country. Strikingly, 85 percent of Somaïr is owned by France’s Atomic Energy Commission and two French companies, while only 15 percent is owned by Niger’s government. Niger produces over 5 percent of the world’s uranium, but its uranium is of a very high quality. Half of Niger’s export receipts are from sales of uranium, oil, and gold. One in three lightbulbs in France are powered by uranium from Niger, at the same time as 42 percent of the African country’s population lived below the poverty line. The people of Niger have watched their wealth slip through their fingers for decades. As a mark of the government’s weakness, over the course of the past decade, Niger has lost over $906 million in only 10 arbitration cases brought by multinational corporations before the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes and the International Chamber of Commerce.

    France stopped using the franc in 2002 when it switched to the Euro system. But, fourteen former French colonies continued to use the Communauté Financiére Africaine (CFA), which gives immense advantages to France (50 percent of the reserves of these countries have to be held in the French Treasury and France’s devaluations of the CFA—as in 1994—have catastrophic effects on the country’s that use it). In 2015, Chad’s president Idriss Déby Itno said that the CFA “pulls African economies down” and that the “time had come to cut the cord that prevents Africa from developing.” Talk now across the Sahel is for not only the removal of French troops—as has taken place in Burkina Faso and in Mali—but of a break with the French economic hold on the region.

    The new non-alignment

    At the 2023 Russia-Africa Summit in July, Burkina Faso’s leader, President Ibrahim Traoré wore a red beret that echoed the uniform of the assassinated socialist leader of his country, Thomas Sankara. Traoré reacted strongly to the condemnation of the military coups in the Sahel, including to a recent visit to his country by an African Union delegation. “A slave that does not rebel does not deserve pity,” he said. “The African Union must stop condemning Africans who decide to fight against their own puppet regimes of the West.”

    In February, Burkina Faso had hosted a meeting that included the governments of Mali and Guinea. On the agenda is the creation of a new federation of these states. It is likely that Niger will be invited into these conversations.

  • Elected representatives from a broad range of Western democracies beyond the United States are taking bold measures to give real voice to citizens in decision-making. Confronted with protests, polarization and pessimism, countries such as Canada, Ireland, France, Germany, Australia, Belgium and the Netherlands are recognizing the need for a system of governance that is more inclusive and…

    Source

  • As humanity recons with a never ending cavalcade of catastrophes, large segments of the population have succumbed to despair or distraction through culture wars or a series of vain cultural phenomena. [Insert Barbenheimer joke here.]

    Many youth, particularly in France, have channeled this hopelessness into rage. For the past several months the country had been seeing a series of strikes and riots in response to the raising of the retirement age, and these riots intensified in late June after the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk during a traffic stop. As the dust settles, inept politicians blame bad parenting and TikTok.

    Meanwhile in Peru, protesters from around the country have gathered in Lima calling for the resignation of President Dina Boluarte and the dissolution of congress.

  • Last Wednesday, Nigerien military officers announced they had overthrown President Mohamed Bazoum, a close ally of the United States and France. ECOWAS, an economic bloc of West African countries, has threatened to take military action unless the coup is reversed by Sunday. But the leader of Niger’s new military junta has vowed to defy any attempts to restore the former president to power…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • By Doddy Morris in Port Vila

    French President Emmanuel Macron and Vanuatu Prime Minister Ishmael Kalsakau have reached an agreement to settle the “land problem” in the southern region of Vanuatu before the end of this year.

    Prime Minister Kalsakau made this declaration during his speech at the 7th Melanesian Arts and Cultural Festival (MACFEST) in Saralana Park yesterday afternoon, coinciding with President Macron’s visit to the festival.

    “We have talked about a topic that is important to the people of Vanuatu in relation to the problem for us in the Southern Islands. The President has said that we will resolve the land problem between now and December,” he said.

    President Macron of France and Vanuatu Prime Minister Kalsakau at MACFEST 2023 at Saralana Park
    President Macron of France and Vanuatu Prime Minister Ishmael Kalsakau at MACFEST 2023 at Saralana Park yesterday afternoon. Image: Doddy Morris/Vanuatu Daily Post

    Though not explicitly naming them, it is evident that the southern land problem mentioned refers to the islands of Matthew and Hunter, located in the southern portion of Vanuatu, over which significant demands have been made.

    In addition to this issue, the boundary between New Caledonia and Vanuatu remains unresolved.

    The hope was that during President Macron’s visit, Prime Minister Kalsakau — carried in a traditional basket by Aneityum bearers during the opening of MACFEST 2023 — would address the Matthew and Hunter issue with the French leader.

    As part of Vanuatu’s traditional practice, Kalsakau and President Macron participated in a kava-drinking ceremony, expressing their wish for the fruitful resolution of the discussed matters.

    Matthew and Hunter are two small and uninhabited volcanic islands in the South Pacific, located 300 kilometres east of New Caledonia and south-east of Vanuatu.

    Both islands are claimed by Vanuatu as part of Tafea province, and considered by the people of Aneityum to be part of their custom ownership. However, since 2007 they had also been claimed by France as part of New Caledonia.

    Elation over statement
    The announcement of the two leaders’ commitment to resolving the southern land issue was met with elation among the people of Vanuatu, particularly in the Tafea province.

    “France has come back to Vanuatu; President Macron has told me that it has been a long time, but he has come back today with huge support to help us more,” said Prime Minister Kalsakau, expressing gratitude.

    The Vanuatu government head revealed that France had allocated a “substantial sum” of money to be signed-off soon, which would lead to significant development in Vanuatu.

    This would include the reconstruction of French schools and hospitals, such as the Melsisi Hospital in Pentecost, which had been damaged by past cyclones.

    In response to the requests made by PM Kalsakau and President Macron, the chiefs of the Tafea province conducted another customary ceremony to acknowledge and honour the visiting leaders.

    President Macron at MACFEST 2023
    More than 4000 people gathered yesterday at Saralana Park to witness the presence of President Macron and warmly welcome him to MACFEST 2023.

    He delighted the crowd by delivering a speech in Bislama language, noting the significance of Vanuatu’s relationship with France and highlighting its special and historical nature.

    “Let me tell you how pleased I am to be with you, not only as a foreign head of state but as a neighbour, coming directly from Noumea,” President Macron said.

    He praised Prime Minister Kalsakau for fostering a strong bond between the two countries amid “various challenges and foreign interactions”, emphasising that their connection went beyond bilateral relations, rooted in their shared history.

    President Macron further shared his satisfaction with the discussions he had with Kalsakau, expressing joy that his day could culminate with the celebration of MACFEST, symbolising the exchange between himself and Vanuatu’s PM.

    “My delegation is thrilled to participate in the dances and demonstrations that bring together delegations from across the region, celebrating the strength and vitality of Melanesia and the spirit of exchange and sharing,” he said.

    The President expressed his pride in being part of the region, particularly in New Caledonia, and witnessing the young teenagers of Melanesia coming together, dancing, and singing, driven by the belief that they will overcome the challenges of today and tomorrow.

    Last night, President Macron departed for Papua New Guinea to continue his historic Pacific visit. He expressed his happiness in meeting members from PNG, Solomon Islands, Fiji, and other participating nations during MACFEST.

    Doddy Morris is a Vanuatu Daily Post journalist. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • People have taken action in the UK, Canada, and France over the imprisonment of UK pro-Palestine activists. It came after high-profile campaigners, including Roger Waters, issued a joint statement condemning the British state’s persecution of the six people over their activism against the state of Israel.

    Imprisoned for resisting Israel’s apartheid

    As the Canary has reported, the British state is currently detaining six activists. It’s over their part in protests about the Israeli state’s ongoing apartheid against the Palestinian people – including its illegal occupation. Specifically, the protests were over UK-based arms companies, and their supply chains, that sell weapons and military kit to Israel.

    Four of the activists have been in prison since December 2022. It’s because they took action to dismantle Teledyne Labtech – a Welsh factory belonging to American-owned Teledyne. The company is the largest exporter by volume of weapons from Britain to Israel. As campaign group Palestine Action said:

    The four activists are the longest serving prisoners for taking action with Palestine Action to disrupt the war machine. Their incarceration demonstrates Britain prioritising the interests of an arms industry which facilitates the genocide of the Palestinian people, over the freedom of its own citizens.

    The two other activists are locked up over an action they took in June 2021 at company APPH. It makes drone landing gear for Elbit Systems, which supplies 85% of Israel’s military drones. One of the jailed activists is Mike Lynch-White. He and others covered APPH’s building in red paint, scaled the roof, and destroyed equipment. Palestine Action said of the two activists:

    They both took action to disrupt the military industrial complex which profits from the blood shed of the Palestinian people and the apartheid regime they’re subjugated too. For this, they should not be imprisoned.

    So, after support from 80 public figures, including Waters, and also a separate statement from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement, Palestine Action organised a day of protests.

    Global solidarity with pro-Palestine activists

    On Saturday 22 July, hundreds of people came out to call for the freedom of Palestine Action political prisoners. In England, people demonstrated in Manchester, Liverpool, London, Birmingham, Sheffield, and Brighton:

    In Sheffield specifically, people took action against Barclays. As the Canary recently reported, the bank, according to the group Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), has:

    over £1 billion in shares and provides over £3 billion in loans and underwriting to 9 companies whose weapons, components, and military technology have been used in Israel’s armed violence against Palestinians.

    Activists also took direct action to “shatter” windows at Keysight Technologies in Telford. It’s a supplier to Elbit Systems:

    Then, there was also international solidarity.

    Groups including Samidoun and Collectif Palestine Vaincra put posters up around France:

    In Canada, people mobilised outside Scotiabank in Vancouver. It holds half a billion dollars in shares in Elbit:

    A ‘desperation’ to protect a foreign apartheid state

    A Palestine Action spokesperson said in a press release:

    For the state to turn to imprisoning its own citizens, demonstrates their desperation to protect the military supply chain of a foreign apartheid state. The show of solidarity from across the world in support of our activists in prison, and others facing prison, for disrupting the production of Israeli weapons, shows the strength of our movement. Collectively, we will resist until all Israeli weapons factories in Britain are shut down and the activists, as well as the Palestinian people, are free.

    As the Canary has documented, the state increasingly criminalising protest is becoming a lot more common and authoritarian as a result of the Tories’ Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts (PCSC) Act. The state jailing pro-Palestinian activists is the thin end of this wedge – but groups like Palestine Action will continue, regardless.

    Featured image via Palestine Action

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Safran Helicopter Engines and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) have decided  to set up their new joint venture company in Bangalore, India. It will be dedicated to the design, development, production, sales and support of helicopter engines, with first objective to build the most adequate propulsion solution for the Indian Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) future 13-ton […]

    The post Safran and HAL to form joint venture company to co-design and produce new generation helicopter engines in India appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • RNZ Pacific

    French President Emmanuel Macron will make a first official visit to Papua New Guinea next Friday as part of a short Pacific trip.

    AFP news agency reports that Macron’s trip will start in New Caledonia before he travels to Vanuatu and Port Moresby.

    A French official told the news agency the trip was “historic” because no French president had ever visited non-French islands in the region.

    President Emmanuel Macron in Noumea on an earlier visit to New Caledonia … “recommitting” France to the Pacific region. Image: Crikey

    Macron will use those two stops to outline his Indo-Pacific strategy, aimed at “recommitting” France to the region, the official said.

    PNG Prime Minister James Marape said he would meet one-on-one with Macron, and the itinerary for the visit also included a courtesy call on Governor-General Sir Bob Dadae and the signing of various agreements.

    Marape emphasised the significance of Macron’s visit in strengthening bilateral relations between France and Papua New Guinea.

    “Under my leadership, France and PNG have been actively enhancing our bilateral relationship, along with other nations,” he said on his website.

    “I appreciate President Macron’s commitment, as demonstrated by his decision to visit PNG and engage in discussions on matters of mutual interest between our countries.”

    Final LNG decision
    Macron’s visit comes on the eve of the final investment decision (FID) by French super-major TotalEnergies on the Papua LNG Project.

    TotalEnergies is also involved in downstream processing of natural resources such as forests.

    “In the midst of the evolving geopolitical landscape in the region, Papua New Guinea serves as ‘neutral ground,’ and I will urge France to consider PNG’s strategic position amid the changing regional dynamics,” Marape added.

    “The visit of President Macron to PNG will further solidify the growing cooperation and shared goals between our two nations, particularly in the areas of forest conservation, French investments in PNG such as TotalEnergies, mobilising resources to support small Pacific Island countries and communities, and other relevant matters.”

    Macron last year relaunched France’s Indo-Pacific approach in the aftermath of a bitter row over a cancelled submarine contract with Australia, casting France as a balancing power in a region dominated by the tussle between China and the United States.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Dakar, July 17, 2023—Burkinabè authorities should immediately reverse the suspension of French television news channel La Chaîne Info (LCI) and stop censoring local and foreign media coverage of the jihadist insurgency in Burkina Faso and the Sahel region, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.

    On June 23, Burkina Faso’s media regulator, the Superior Council for Communication (known by its French acronym CSC), suspended LCI, which is part of private broadcaster TF1, for three months for allegedly airing false information about deteriorating security conditions in the country on its current affairs show, “24H Pujadas,” according to several media reports and a copy of the decision.

    “We call on the Burkinabè authorities to reverse their decision and immediately lift the suspension of LCI’s broadcasting,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator in New York. “The latest suspension of a French media outlet over its insurgency reporting appears retaliatory rather than grounded in fact and robs the people of Burkina Faso of their right to know what is happening in their country.”

    Thousands of Burkinabè citizens have died and millions have been displaced in the eight-year insurgency led by militants affiliated with Al-Qaeda and Islamic State, who currently control large areas of the country. Soured relations between France, the country’s former colonial power, and Burkina Faso’s ruling military junta led to the February withdrawal of French troops helping to fight the insurgents.

    LCI is the third French outlet to be suspended since December 2022 in Burkina Faso after France 24’s suspension in March and the radio station RFI in December. In addition, two French journalists working for Le Monde and Libération were expelled from Burkina Faso in April.

    The CSC suspension decision said commentary by LCI’s popular “24H Pujadas” host, Abnousse Shalmani, on an April 24 segment titled “Sahel, the lost zone” was “not based on any concrete evidence” and “lacked objectivity and credibility.” It also said the report exaggerated the scale of the insurgency and “seditiously” exposed “unverified” failures in Burkina Faso’s military response to the insurgency, Reuters reported.

    Blahima Traoré, CSC general secretary, told CPJ by messaging app that the three satellite television providers that carry LCI for subscribers, were formally notified of the decision on June 23.

    Canal+ Burkina, Neerwaya Multivision, and Stars Médias Burkina—the three providers—would be “liable for penalties” if they failed to suspend LCI for three months from the notification date, a CSC notification sent to Canal+ Burkina’s general manager said. At least one of the three—Canal+ Burkina—has suspended LCI broadcasts, but the channel is still available online, Guézouma Sanogo, president of the Association of Journalists of Burkina, told CPJ via messaging app on July 10. CPJ was not able to immediately confirm whether Neerwaya Multivision and Stars Médias Burkina have suspended LCI broadcasts.

    According to Article 46 of the 2013 law that establishes the regulator and sets out its powers and composition, the CSC can suspend the broadcasting of a program “for a maximum of three months” depending on the seriousness of the breach.

    CPJ tried unsuccessfully to contact LCI and Shalmani for comment via their social media accounts.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Image of French flag.

    Image by Anthony Choren.

    The police racist killing of children is a regular occurance for decades in France, often triggering burgeoning spontaneous working class insurgencies. The moments after French police killed 17yr old ‘Nahel M’ in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre wasn’t any different. 45,000 riot police, including the infamously brutal BRI special forces, contributed to the quelling of another uprising in France conducted mostly by young working classes of African heritage in the ‘banlieues’ or contained council estates often many miles out of the urban centres. Over two nights of the uprising at least 2,000 insurgents have been arrested by French authorities, the average age of arrestees is 17yrs old, pointing to another generation that will see considerable sections of their neighbours experiencing the French criminal justice system and prisons that will only boost their sense of alienation and confrontation with the French colonial state. Black working class communities across colonial centres in the ‘West’ are seeing multiple generations of the same family in prisons at the same time.The average age of the arestees also indicates how young our children are brutalised by the police and schools. The youth who led the uprising are of African heritage, both northern (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) and also other regions like from West Africa and other former colonies of the French state. The uprising saw the insurrectionists use fire bombs, grenades and firearms against the state, indicating a further intensification by means of tactics as compared to previous similar uprisings. There is much to explore as to the significance of the uprising by means of class-struggle against capitalist-colonialism and for socialism in the colonial centre in a context of global victories of white supremacist racism and the far-right.

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    Sukant Chandan is a London-based decolonial anti-imperialist activist and analyst. He advocated justice for Libyans in visiting Libya three times during the Nato onslaught in 2011 and reports frequently on English-language news channels based in Russia, Iran, China and Lebanon on which he discusses issues pertaining to the challenges of the struggle to end neo-colonialism. He can be contacted at sukant.chandan@gmail.com.

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sukant Chandan.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ANALYSIS: By Hugh Piper and Anna Gibert

    As geopolitics brings increasing engagement by external actors with the Pacific, there is a need to coordinate more effectively — including Australia and France.

    At the same time, better coordination must be done in a consultative and respectful manner in partnership with Pacific nations, particularly in light of Australia’s commitment to a “new era” with the region.

    In a new report by the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue (AP4D), we identify how Australia can work with France to contribute to addressing some of the Pacific’s challenges.

    To help inform our conclusions, we conducted discussions with Pacific Islanders in Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga who have experience working with Australia and France.

    Development coordination is crucial for maximising the impact of scarce resources and ensuring that the often-limited bandwidth of Pacific governments is not overwhelmed — and that local sovereignty and perspectives are prioritised.

    Playing to the strengths of different actors, drawing on collective expertise, and avoiding duplicating or undermining respective efforts are also crucial. Donor coordination forums and conferences, greater visibility and mapping of respective contributions, alignment on diligence and compliance requirements, and dedicated resources for coordination are all ideas to explore.

    Australia and France can work together to improve coordination, alongside other actors including the US, New Zealand, Japan, European institutions, and multilateral development banks. While yet to demonstrate its practical value fully, the Partners in the Blue Pacific initiative promises to perform such a function — though France and the EU are only observers, and it has received a mixed reception in the Pacific.

    Maritime domain awareness
    Australia should ensure that the grouping remains open to, and engaged with, France as much as possible. The first substantial focus area for Partners in the Blue Pacific is illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, and it is important for France to remain engaged, given its substantial exclusive economic zones in the Pacific and capacity to contribute to maritime domain awareness.

    At the same time, consultations in the Pacific also noted the risk for Australia in working too closely with France and EU institutions, as this may lead to a reduction in the responsiveness for which Australia is highly valued. Engaging with, and accessing funding from, the EU is widely seen to be onerous, highly bureaucratic and operationally decontextualised.

    Australia must also confront in frank terms the risks of working with France in the Pacific. It needs to grapple with the complexity of relationships with New Caledonia and French Polynesia and how they engage in forums such as the Pacific Islands Forum on essentially the same terms as sovereign nations, even though key policy domains including foreign relations remain under Paris’s purview.

    Australia needs to be cognisant of how perspectives can diverge between overseas and metropolitan France and sensitively navigate this complexity.

    In parts of the region, people express resentment and distrust driven by France’s nuclear testing, colonial history, and ongoing sovereignty over parts of the Pacific. Developments in recent years around New Caledonia’s status, especially the 2021 independence referendum, have added to this.

    Pacific voices saw France’s approach in the Pacific as more top-down, with less engagement with local needs and preferences when compared to Australia’s agenda, which is increasingly focused on localisation and sustainability. A widely held perception of lower French cultural and linguistic competency in the Pacific further hinders this.

    Moreover, the wider context of the Australian government’s push towards a First Nations foreign policy, and its willingness to speak openly about the legacy of colonialism in the Indo-Pacific, must be considered in the context of engaging France in the Pacific.

    Reputational risk
    There is a reputational risk for Australia were it to be conspicuously inactive on indigenous issues with respect to the French territories while engaging with such issues elsewhere.

    While it is clear that the Australian government intends to remain neutral on the future status of French territories, it must be cognisant of, and proactive in, managing these risks while at the same time maintaining a close relationship with metropolitan France.

    One way of doing this is to continue to foster positive people-to-people links with Indigenous people in French Pacific territories. This would build on existing work in New Caledonia, for instance, to establish cultural and artistic links with First Nations Australians and to share indigenous knowledge on land management.

    Expanding the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme to New Caledonians and offering scholarships, similar to Australia Awards, to people in New Caledonia and French Polynesia could also help boost links with Australia.

    Such initiatives are a low-risk way of engaging Indigenous people in French territories without undermining Australia’s neutrality on questions of sovereignty and independence. They would also demonstrate Australia actively boosting the status of Indigenous people in French territories and delivering on its First Nations foreign policy approach.

    Pacific voices told us that humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) is the most advanced area of Australia-France coordination (through the tripartite FRANZ Arrangement), demonstrated by recent responses to natural disasters in Vanuatu, Tonga, and Fiji.

    Such responses, however, could be improved with deeper local political economy analysis and consultation with local people and structures. Australia and France should also seek to derive lessons from HADR to inform coordination in other sectors.

    Cooperation presence
    Consultations identified that France had the most consistent and visible development cooperation presence (outside its own territories) in Vanuatu. However, in both Vanuatu and across the region more broadly, it was seen that there is significant scope for Australia and France to coordinate more effectively.

    Greater dialogue, information sharing, planning and consultation with local leaders and systems should be prioritised in-country to increase aggregated investment effectiveness. A clear commitment to coordination by Australia and France would also mitigate “donor overcrowding” and help manage the workload of Pacific bureaucracies.

    Indeed, it would be to Australia and France’s credit to lead increased coordination as “responsible donors”. Pacific voices across the region identified several areas where joint work between Australia and France could be beneficial, including support for local media and civil society, advancing gender equality, sports development, education (especially in Vanuatu given its bilingual school system), and infrastructure (especially attracting EU finance).

    Australia should generally support a greater French development contribution throughout the Pacific. Naturally, any joint work or coordination should be driven by the policy settings of Pacific nations and developed in consultation with the Pacific leaders.

    In doing so, the language and ethos of the Blue Pacific Continent should be employed.

    The French development agency, AFD, is likely to increase its contribution in the Pacific, focused on infrastructure, environment, oceans and climate resilience. There are, however, almost no established patterns of coordination between Australia and France in the Pacific on development.

    There are substantial barriers to joint work on development projects by Australia and France, given unfamiliar bureaucracies, different languages, different ways of working, and different approaches to financing. Feasible bilateral cooperation is most likely to be in the form of discrete contributions, such as co-financing by one donor on a project predominately managed by the other.

    Increasing contributions
    Australia could consider increasing its contribution to the French-run Kiwa Initiative, and France could build on its current volunteer investment into the Australian-funded Vanuatu Skills Partnership. There could also be scope for France to direct its development finance through the Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific.

    Bilateral coordination mechanisms and regular dialogue between Australian and French officials should be established as soon as possible, including by finalising a letter of intent between DFAT and AFD.

    Effective communication between Canberra and Paris, as well as in-country between Australian and French diplomatic posts and with Pacific governments, will be important to operationalise this intent meaningfully.

    More broadly, Australia should encourage France to direct its development contributions in the Pacific through NGOs, civil society organisations, multilateral institutions, and proven Australian-funded initiatives that support local leadership and have local legitimacy, in line with its First Nations foreign policy approach and localisation agenda.

    Hugh Piper is programme lead of the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy & Defence Dialogue (AP4D). Anna Gibert is an independent consultant who provides strategic support to a number of locally led DFAT investments in the Pacific. This article is republished from the ANU Development Policy Centre’s DevPolicy Blog under a Creative Commons licence.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Bastille Day marks the storming of the notorious Parisian fortress and political prison in 1789. The day is meant to embody the liberal and egalitarian values of the French Republic. On 14 July that year, locals rose up against monarchy and totalitarianism. The French stormed the fortress, killed its governor, and freed prisoners from their cells. With this in mind you’d think the French ruling class might be a little more reflective. But not so, at least as far as president Emmanuel Macron is concerned.

    This year the holiday comes after weeks of riots against the Macron government following the police killing of a Muslim and immigrant teenager. Macron himself chose to mark the day in a less traditional fashion: signing an arms deal with a repulsive xenophobe, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi.

    Riots in Paris

    On 17 June, French police shot dead a 17-year-old know as Nahel M. Protests started in Toulouse, Dijon, and Lyon before spreading to Paris. Thousands of riot police were deployed onto the streets.

    Macron’s response to the killing and the protests was typical of his flip-flopping centrism. As the Canary’s Maryam Jameela wrote:

    Macron has said that the protests are “unjustifiable.” Earlier, however, he also said that Nahel’s death was “inexplicable and inexcusable”. So, which is it?

    Macron’s response is typical from those who, thanks to footage of killings, are forced to acknowledge the horror, without allowing for criticism of a system that equips murder at traffic stops.

    Macron’s death-dealing

    This is the climate in which Macron has chosen to sign an arms deal with Modi, himself no stranger to authoritarian, xenophobic violence, Modi, who is also close to Rishi Sunak, allegedly had a BBC office in India raided recently.

    It followed the airing of a documentary on a 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom by supporters of his Hindu nationalist party. This was in Gujarat when Modi was provincial governor. As the Canary reported at the time:

    In fact, the BBC documentary on Modi cited a British foreign ministry report claiming that Modi met senior police officers and “ordered them not to intervene” in anti-Muslim violence.

    Around 45,000 police have been deployed nationwide in France ahead of a ceremony for Modi. Firework sales are banned by the government following protests around the police killing. The Indian leader will be awarded the Legion of Honour after a military parade.

    Complex colonialities

    But, beneath the ridiculous pomp, the profit motive drives proceedings. The Indian defence ministry on Thursday announced its intention to procure another 26 French-made Rafale fighter jets as well as three more Scorpene-class submarines. The deal is expected to be worth billions of euros.

    Bastille Day has long since been militarised and stripped of its radical origins. The fact that an event meant, at least in spirit, to mark the fraternity of humanity is reduced to an arms deal sweetener says it all.

    Modi’s presence doubly complicates the issue, given that his party’s sectarian supremacism grew out of the legacies of British colonialism. And beyond that, the shadow of a police killing of a young boy from a migrant background cannot be forgotten. France has many things going for it, but ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ are increasingly out of fashion. 

    Additional reporting by Agence-France Presse. 

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Chris McNabb, cropped to 1910 x 1000.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Asia Pacific Report

    Kanaky New Caledonia’s parliamentary President (speaker) Roch Wamytan says it is time for France to end colonisation in the Pacific territory.

    Speaking to journalists while in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) ministerial meeting last week, he said: “It is time for France to grant independence to New Caledonia.”

    Wamytan, president of the Territorial Assembly in Noumea, noted that France had made New Caledonia its colony for more than 160 years, reports APA.

    He said the page of colonisation should be closed and that Kanaky New Caledonia should be granted independence.

    Wamytan thanked Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev for his statement on colonialism at the NAM meeting and emphasised that the president’s words were an important support for the Kanak people to gain independence.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Caricature of the Third Estate carrying the First Estate (clergy) and the Second Estate (nobility) on its back. “You should hope that this game will be over soon.”

    The Counter-Enlightenment is the name given to the oppositional forces that formed during the Enlightenment that fought against the philosophes‘ writings on democracy, republicanism and toleration. These forces were known as the anti-philosophes and sought to maintain the dominance of the monarchy and the church.

    The philosophes (French for ‘philosophers’) were eighteenth century intellectuals who “applied reason to the study of many areas of learning, including philosophy, history, science, politics, economics and social issues.” Most importantly, they believed in progress and tolerance and in many different ways sought to highlight injustice and seek ways of changing society for the better.

    The anti-philosophes rose up to defend ‘throne and altar’ and over time many of the ideals of the anti-philosophes were taken over by Romanticism in the nineteenth century, and the conservative politics of the twentieth century; for example, in Western culture, “depending on the particular nation, conservatives seek to promote a range of social institutions such as the nuclear family, organized religion, the military, property rights, and monarchy.”

    The origins of right-wing politics in Europe are often attributed to Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the Irish philosopher, who is seen as the philosophical father of modern conservatism. His book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, is a criticism of the French Revolution, which itself was partly fueled by the writings of the philosophes, thus setting up the dividing lines between the supporters of radical republicanism and revolution, in opposition to the supporters of the older monarchy and church of the ancien régime.

    The idea of the Counter-Enlightenment is itself controversial as some academics argue that an organised force against the Enlightenment was non-existent, or at the very least, a complex debate. For example, Jeremy L. Caradonna (There Was No Counter-Enlightenment) and Robert E. Norton (The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment) both look at contradictory aspects of the individuals called anti-philosophes. As has been noted the thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment “did not necessarily agree to a set of counter-doctrines but instead each challenged specific elements of Enlightenment thinking, such as the belief in progress, the rationality of all humans, liberal democracy, and the increasing secularisation of society.”

    It was Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), the Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas who popularised the term in his essay ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’. Berlin was critical of the irrationalism of the early conservative figures from the 1700s such as Joseph de Maistre, Giambattista Vico, and J. G. Hamann. He also examined the German reaction to the French Enlightenment and Revolution as the main source of reaction to the Enlightenment in general and which eventually led to the Romanticist movement. Berlin noted that:

    Such influential writers such as Voltaire, d’Alembert and Condorcet believed that the development of the arts and sciences was the most powerful human weapon in attaining these ends [e.g. satisfaction of basic physical and biological needs, peace, happiness, justice etc] and the sharpest weapon in the fight against ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, oppression and barbarism, which crippled human effort and frustrated man’s search for truth and self-direction. 1

    Writers like Darrin M. McMahon have looked at the early opponents of the Enlightenment in pre-Revolutionary France, while Graeme Garrard has shown in detail the conservative counter-Enlightenment ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a very different perspective on one of the heroes of the French Revolution.

    In this essay I will look at the individuals and groups who took a stand against the philosophes through their movements, books, and journals in support of the church and monarchy.

    Early opposition to the Enlightenment

    Opposition to the philosophes of the Enlightenment did not start with the French Revolution. According to McMahon in his book Enemies of the Enlightenment:

    Only recently have scholars begun to acknowledge that conservative salons existed in the eighteenth century in which the philosophes‘ ideas were regarded with horror… 2

    Many writers in France mocked the progressive ideas of the philosophes in “a host of satirical plays, libels, and novels published in the late 1750s, 1760s and early 1770s”. 3  McMahon comments that: “It stands to reason that the reaction to the Enlightenment should also have occurred first in the place of its birth and been spearheaded by the very institution – the Catholic Church – charged with maintaining the faith and morals of the realm”. 4

    This can be seen, for example, in the Frontispiece to the physician Claude-Marie Giraud’s Epistle from the Devil to M. Voltaire which chronicled Voltaire’s ‘traffic with Satan’, and was republished over thirty times between 1760 and the outbreak of the Revolution.

    “Frontispiece to the physician Claude-Marie Giraud’s Epistle from the Devil to M. Voltaire. This brief work, chronicling Voltaire’s traffic with Satan, was republished over thirty times between 1760 and the outbreak of the Revolution.”  5

    The adverse reaction to the ideas of the philosophes was evident in the hundreds of books, pamphlets, sermons, essays, and poems written against them, as well as becoming the raison d’être of journals such as the Anée littéraire, the Journal historique et littéraire, and the Journal ecclésiastique. 6 McMahon writes about how the enemies of ‘throne and altar’ and their ‘treasonous’ activities were perceived by the anti-philosophes:

    The anti-philosophes saw the philosophes as ‘enemies of the state’, ‘evil citizens’, ‘declared adversaries of throne and altar’, and unpatriotic subjects guilty of human and divine treason. […] Thus, the anti-philosophes frequently accused their opponents of spreading “republican” and “democratic” ideas. The philosophes, they claimed, preached the sovereignty of the people, advocated “perfect equality,” and spoke endlessly of “social contracts.” They lauded the political institutions of the United Kingdom, spreading a contagious “Anglomania” that held up Parliament and the limitations placed on the powers of the English crown as models to be emulated in France. And they talked ad nauseum of “liberty and equality,” natural rights and the “rights of the people” without ever mentioning duties and obligations.” 7

    They even appealed to the new dauphin [The distinctive title (originally Dauphin of Viennois) of the eldest son of the king of France, from 1349 until the revolution of 1830] to be wary of the new anti-religious attitude that was being spread by the philosophes: “From this anarchy of the physical and moral universe results, necessarily, the overthrow of thrones, the extinction of sovereigns, and the dissolution of all societies. Oh Kings! Oh Sovereigns! Will you be strong enough to stay on your thrones if this principle ever prevails?” 8

    The 1757 frontispiece to the first volume of Jean Soret and Jean-Nicolas-Hubert Hayer’s anti-philosophe journal, La Religion vengée, ou Réfutation des auteurs impies. True philosophy, in possession of the keys to the church, presents a copy of the work to the dauphin, Louis Ferdinand, who looks on approvingly as religion and wisdom trample false philosophy under foot. The latter bears a sign which reads in Latin, “He said that there is no God.” 9

    The power of the philosophes‘ ideas could be seen in their influence on the French Revolution of 1789 and in particular on the human civil rights document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (French: Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen de 1789) which was adopted on the 26 of August 1789 by the National Constituent Assembly during the French Revolution.

    Ultra-Royalist reaction

    However, the Ultra-Royalist reaction, the nobility of high society who strongly supported Roman Catholicism as the state and only legal religion of France, as well as the Bourbon monarchy, initiated what became known as the Second White Terror, a counter-revolution against the French Revolution.

    It provided an opportunity for the counter-Enlightenment conservatives to get their revenge on the revolutionaries, taking the form of militant struggle that resulted in bloody consequences. For example:

    The Ultra-Royalist assembly returned after the upheaval of the Hundred Days, this conservative revolution set out to cleanse France of the men and spirits of 1789. Throughout the country, exceptional courts and special jurisdictions tried and punished revolutionary criminals. In the civil service and royal administration as many as fifty thousand to eighty thousand former officials were stripped of their positions, and in the church, the army, and the universities, similar purges were encouraged, although on a smaller scale. In the provinces, particularly in the Midi, marauding gangs took matters into their own hands, hunting down revolutionary collaborators and settling old scores in a great bloodletting known as the White Terror. 10

    However, the Terror worried even the king himself as in 1816 Louis XVIII dissolved the chambre introuvable, to the great horror of the Catholic Right: “Louis feared its intransigent refusal to compromise with any vestige of the Revolution, its exaggerated religiosity, and its resolute efforts to exact retribution from the “criminals” who had sullied France.” Thus the conservative pro-monarchy forces had become even more royalist than the king himself. 11

    The Chambre introuvable (French for “Unobtainable Chamber”) was the first “Chamber of Deputies elected after the Second Bourbon Restoration in 1815. It was dominated by Ultra-royalists who completely refused to accept the results of the French Revolution.”

    The conservative ideas of the Ultras, for example, “the weight of history, the primacy of the social whole, the centrality of the family, the necessity of religion, and the dangers of tolerance” found their way into many right-wing and conservative ideologies of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.12

    Rousseau’s turn against reason and science

    Similarly, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conservative turn laid the groundwork for the future irrationalist Romanticist movement. Despite  Rousseau’s popularity as a philosopher of the French Revolution, Rousseau ultimately went against the rationalism and intellectualism of the eighteenth century and moved towards a philosophy based on emotion, imagination and religion.

    “Flee, vile imposters, no longer sully this temple”, the frontispiece to Pierre-Victor-Jean Berthre de Bourniseaux, Le Charlatanisme dans tous les âges dévoilé (Paris, 1807). Angels of the Lord banish the philosophes from the Temple of Truth. In the foreground, Voltaire, Rousseau, La Mettrie, Plato,and other philosophes flee in despair. 13

    According to Graham Garrard in Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment:

    Rousseau’s “unequivocal preference was for the “happy ignorance” of Sparta over Athens, that “fatherland of the Sciences and the Arts” the philosophes so much admired. He regarded virtue as much more important than knowledge or cognitive ability; a good heart is worth inestimable more than the possession of knowledge or a cultivated intellect, he thought” and concludes that “relying on reason – as philosophers do – “far from delivering me from my useless doubts, would only cause those which tormented me to multiply and would resolve none of them. Therefore, I took another guide, and I said to myself, ‘Let us consult the inner light’”. 14

    Rousseau’s inward looking attitude and distrust of reason resulted in a very different kind of politics than the philosophes had imagined, as Garrard writes:

    Unlike the foundation of political society envisaged by Hobbes and Locke, [Rousseau] stresses the need for a legislator who relies principally on religion and myth rather than reason, self interest, or fear to “bind the citizens to the fatherland and to one another.” […] For Rousseau, religion substitutes for reason as the cement of society and the means of inducing respect for the laws. […] Rousseau’s legislator is a prophet and (perhaps) a poet, whose “magic” produces a nation, rather than a philosopher who appeals to reason. 15

    For Rousseau the spread of knowledge was to be controlled and funnelled into localist communities and beliefs, away from modern conceptions of the nation state:

    Rousseau was opposed to the popularization of knowledge, not to knowledge per se. In his final reply to critics of his first Discourse, he clarifies position by stressing this distinction between knowledge and its dissemination. “[I]t is good for there to be Philosophers,”he writes, “provided that the People doesn’t get mixed up in being Philosophers”. 16

    Leo Strauss’s sentiments exactly! Knowledge as a set of myths that would keep the masses happy but not the kind of universalist knowledge that might lead them to revolt:

    The key to Rousseau’s patriotic program is what he referred to as a “truly national education.” Unlike the “party of humanity,” he called for education to be put entirely in the service of particular national communities in order to prevent the corrosive spread of universal ideas and beliefs. He rejected the view put forth by the philosophes that the universal arts and sciences are an adequate basis for political community. 17

    The Despair of the philosophes. Frontispiece to the 1817 edition of the prolific anti-philosophe Élie Harel’s Voltaire: Particularités curieuses de sa vie et de sa mort, new ed. (Paris, 1817). Christ reigns supreme over a fallen medusa, who vomits up the Encyclopédie, Rousseau’s Émile, Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique, and other key Enlightenment texts.” 18

    Moreover, Rousseau advocated the use of catharsis and ‘bread and circuses’ to maintain loyalty to the patriotic fatherland (and thereby stymieing any type of burgeoning class consciousness):

    Rousseau also advised would-be legislators to establish “exclusive and national” religious ceremonies; games which “[keep] the Citizen frequently assembled;” exercises that increase their national “pride and self esteem;” and spectacles which, by reminding citizens of their glorious past, “stirred their hearts, fired them with a lively spirit of emulation, and strongly attached them to the fatherland with which they were being kept constantly occupied. 19

    Rousseau opens one of his most famous books, The Social Contract, with the words ‘Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains’ yet this was a far cry from Marx’s ‘You have nothing to lose but your chains’, as Rousseau refers to rising up against a tyrant, not rising up against one’s own slavery. Especially not the ‘respectable rights’ of ‘masters over their servants’:

    The Protestant, republican Rousseau bristled with indignation at the thought of his hardy, virtuous Genevans watching the cynical comedies of Moliere who, “for the sake of multiplying his jokes, shakes the whole order of society; how scandalously he overturns all the most sacred relations on which it is founded; how ridiculous he makes the respectable rights of fathers over their children, of husbands over their wives, of masters over their servants! 20

    Rousseau’s move away from enlightened humanism to authoritarianism can be seen in his attitude towards the state whereby any “attempt to liberate a prisoner, even if unjustly arrested, amounts to rebellion, which the state has a right to punish.” 21

    If we compare this to Voltaire’s involvement in L’affair Calas we see a very different attitude, as Voltaire fought in defence of a Huguenot merchant who was broken on the wheel for a crime that he had not committed.

    Furthermore, Rousseau believed that “The taste for letters, philosophy, and the fine arts softens bodies and souls. Work in the study renders men delicate, weakens their temperament, and the soul retains its vigour with difficulty when the body has lost its vigour. Study uses up the machine, consumes spirits, destroys strength, enervates courage. … Study corrupts his morals, impairs his health, destroys his temperament, and often spoils his reason.” 22

    The Enlightenment philosophes thought the opposite: “The less men reason, the more wicked they are,” wrote the Baron d’Holbach. “Savages, princes, nobles and the dregs of the people, are commonly the worst of men, because they reason the least.” 23

    The Counter-Enlightenment and Romanticist ideas today

    The Enlightenment seems to get blamed for everything these days. In an article titled  ‘Enlightenment rationality is not enough: we need a new Romanticism’, the author Jim Kozubek writes:

    From the use of GMO seeds and aquaculture to assert control over the food chain to military strategies for gene-engineering bioweapons, power is asserted through patents and financial control over basic aspects of life. The French philosopher Michel Foucault in The Will to Knowledge (1976) referred to such advancements as ‘techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’.

    Foucault does at least remark on a basic aspect of the problem: subjugation and control.

    Kozubek comments that “science is exploited into dystopian realities – such fraught areas as neo-eugenics through gene engineering and unequal access to drugs and medical care” but notes that “The biggest tug-of-war is not between science and religious institutional power, but rather between the primal connection to nature and scientific institutional power.”

    Historically, the Enlightenment was a battle between the church and the new scientific approaches to knowledge in the 18th century. The philosophes wrote against the power of the church and the monarchies and developed progressive ideas about democracy and republicanism, torture and the death penalty, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.

    In the frontispiece to Voltaire’s book on Newton’s philosophy, Émilie du Châtelet appears as Voltaire’s muse, reflecting Newton’s heavenly insights down to Voltaire.

    However, this universalising philosophy and writing against injustice of the Enlightenment philosophes is missing from modern analyses of Romanticism, that by the 19th century those battles had developed into the Romanticist ‘primal connection to nature’ versus capitalist technocracy. Yet, what the Romanticists and the technocrats did have in common was that neither questioned slavery: whether it be the slavery of feudalism (which the Romanticists liked to hark back to), or the wage slavery of modern capitalism (which the technocrats prefer to ignore).

    In fact, the Romanticists and the technocrats helped each other in a reactionary symbiotic relationship that perpetuated the status quo: the Romanticists had always used technology (to indulge their fantasies, for example, train technology brought them to gaze in awe at the ‘mystical’ Alps), while the technocrats used Romanticism to create diversion and escapism for the masses (thereby avoiding mass uprisings and revolution). This can be seen in the almost wholly Romanticist culture of fantasy, terror, horror, superheroes etc. that dominates global modern culture today in the era of global monopoly capitalism.

    The Enlightenment and its opposing counter-Enlightenment, represented the main ideological battles of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but as people became less and less religious over the ensuing century, Romanticism took over from the irrationalism of the church as the main counter-progressive force in society.

    This can be seen also in the ‘suspicion of reason’ contained in the definitions of the post-Romanticist ideologies of Modernism and Postmodernism, and the outright return to Romanticism of Metamodernism. Once the bourgeois revolutions of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité‘  had been carried through, the universalist ideas of the philosophes were quietly dropped and the anti- (wage) slavery torch passed on to the revolutionary socialists.

    It seems that the role of Romanticist movements (including Modernism, Postmodernism, and Metamodernism) is to react to any burgeoning progressive movement, to suck the life blood out of it and while not necessarily killing it, to at least leave it extremely weakened and non-threatening.

    Meanwhile, any obvious lack of consistency in Romanticist movements merely points to, and demonstrates, its reactive nature. For example, Romanticist neo-Gothic is full of decoration, yet Romanticist (Modernist) Minimalism, in the form of Bauhaus, for example, is completely devoid of decoration.

    McMahons description of the anti-philosophes confirms that reactive view:

    If the philosophes assailed religion, then the anti-philosophes must protect it. If the philosophes attacked the king, then his authority must be upheld. If the philosophes vaunted the individual, then the social whole must be defended. If the philosophes corrupted the family, then its importance must be reaffirmed. And if the philosophes advocated change, then the anti-philosophes must prevent it. 24

    While the Right may not be able to get away with arguments for the re-establishment of monarchies these days, their ideology is still rooted in organized religion and the social teachings of the church, (combined with the military, and property rights).

    The philosophes were progressive thinkers who struggled for radical changes against the injustices of their time. Their universalist writings on liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state are just as important in the world today as they have ever been, especially in an era of increasing globalised poverty where one  billion people worldwide live in slums (and yet this figure is projected to grow to 2 billion by 2030) and which is exacerbated by rising inflation and the impacts of war. It is time now for new thinking that is not dominated by the selfish political and war agendas of the billionaire media machine.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Nahel M., a 17-year-old poor French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan origin, died of a single bullet fired by a French police officer at almost point-blank range on June 27. When I heard the news about the murder of young Nahel in the ghetto-ized suburb of Nanterre, shot at close range because he initially refused to stop his vehicle, my mind went back to the mainly Algerian-populated and…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • More than 61,000 people died due to the heat during Europe’s record-breaking summer last year. That’s according to a new study which called for more to be done to protect against even deadlier heatwaves expected in the coming years.

    Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, and experienced its hottest summer on record in 2022. Countries were hit by blistering heatwaves, crop-withering droughts, and devastating wildfires.

    Heat data

    The EU‘s statistics agency Eurostat had reported an unusually high number of excess deaths over the summer. However, the amount directly linked to the heat had not been previously quantified.

    Researchers from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health and France’s health research institute INSERM (L’Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale) used models to predict the deaths attributable to temperature for each region in every week of 2022’s summer.

    The team looked at data on temperature and mortality from 2015 to 2022. This covered 823 regions across 35 European countries, for a total of 543 million people.

    They estimated that 61,672 deaths were linked to the heat between May 30 and September 4 last year, according to the study published in the journal Nature Medicine.

    A particularly intense heatwave in the week of 18-24 July caused more than 11,600 deaths alone.

    INSERM researcher and study co-author Hicham Achebak said:

    It is a very high number of deaths.

    We knew the effect of heat on mortality after 2003, but with this analysis, we see that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to protect the population.

    More than 70,000 excess deaths were recorded in 2003 during one of the worst heatwaves in European history.

    Women and over-80s vulnerable

    Last year, France recorded the biggest rise in heat compared to its previous summer average, with a jump of 2.43°c. Switzerland was not far behind with a 2.30°c rise. It was then followed by Italy with 2.28°c and Hungary with 2.13°c.

    Italy had the highest death toll linked to the heat with 18,010, followed by Spain with 11,324, and Germany with 8,173.

    The majority of deaths were of people over the age of 80. Furthermore, around 63% of those who died due to the heat were women. The difference became more stark over the age of 80, when women had a mortality rate 27% higher than men.

    Previous research has shown that Europe is warming at twice the global average.

    While the world has warmed an average of nearly 1.2°c since the mid-1800s, last year Europe was around 2.3°c hotter than pre-industrial times.

    Rising casualties

    Unless something is done to protect people against rising temperatures, by 2030 Europe will face an average of more than 68,000 heat-related deaths every summer, the study estimated.

    By 2040, there would be an average of more than 94,000 heat-linked deaths. Then, by 2050, the number could rise to over 120,000.

    Achebak added that:

    These predictions are based on the current level of vulnerability and future temperatures.

    If we take very effective measures, that vulnerability can be reduced.

    Raquel Nunes, a health and climate expert at the UK’s Warwick University, not involved in the research, said the study:

    highlights the urgent need for action to protect vulnerable populations from the impacts of heatwaves.

    Chloe Brimicombe, a climate scientist at Austria’s University of Graz, said it:

    demonstrates that heat prevention strategies need to be re-evaluated, with gender and age especially in mind.

    Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Toreti, A. et al, resized to 1910*1000, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license,

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has distinctly strayed from its original purpose.  It has become, almost shamelessly, the vessel and handmaiden of US power, while its burgeoning expansion eastwards has done wonders to upend the applecart of stability.

    From that upending, the alliance started bungling.  It engaged, without the authorisation of the UN Security Council, in a 78-day bombing campaign of Yugoslavia – at least what was left of it – ostensibly to protect the lives of Kosovar Albanians.  Far from dampening the tinderbox, the Kosovo affair continues to be an explosion in the making.

    Members of the alliance also expended material, money and personnel in Afghanistan over the course of two decades, propping up a deeply unpopular, corrupt regime in Kabul while failing to stifle the Taliban.  As with previous imperial projects, the venture proved to be a catastrophic failure.

    In 2011, NATO again was found wanting in its attack on the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.   While it was intended to be an exemplar of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, the intervention served to eventually topple the doomed Colonel Gaddafi, precipitating the de-facto partitioning of Libya and endangering the very civilians the mission was meant to protect.  A continent was thereby destabilised.  The true beneficiaries proved to be the tapestry of warring rebel groups characterised by sectarian impulses and a voracious appetite for human rights abuses and war crimes.

    The Ukraine War has been another crude lesson in the failings of the NATO project.  The constant teasing and wooing of Kyiv as a potential future member never sat well with Moscow and while much can be made of the Russian invasion, no realistic assessment of the war’s origins can excise NATO from playing a deep, compromised role.

    The alliance is also proving dissonant among its members.  Not all are exactly jumping at the chance of admitting Ukraine.  German diplomats have revealed that they will block any current moves to join the alliance.  Even that old provoking power, the United States, is not entirely sure whether doors should be open to Kyiv.  On CNN, President Joe Biden expressed the view that he did not “think it’s ready for membership of NATO.”  To qualify, Ukraine would have to meet a number of “qualifications” from “democratisation to a whole range of other issues.”  While hardly proving very alert during the interview (at one point, he confused Ukraine with Russia) he did draw the logical conclusion that bringing Kyiv into an alliance of obligatory collective defence during current hostilities would automatically put NATO at war with Moscow.

    With such a spotty, blood speckled record marked by stumbles and bungles, any suggestions of further engagement by the alliance in other areas of the globe should be treated with abundant wariness.  The latest talk of further Asian engagement should also be greeted with a sense of dread.  According to a July 7 statement, “The Indo-Pacific is important for the Alliance, given that developments in that region can directly affect Euro-Atlantic security.  Moreover, NATO and its partners in the region share a common goal of working together to strengthen the rules-based international order.”  With these views, conflict lurks.

    The form of that engagement is being suggested by such ideas as opening a liaison office in Japan, intended as the first outpost in Asia.  It also promises to feature in the NATO summit to take place in Vilnius on July 11 and 12, which will again repeat the attendance format of the Madrid summit held in 2022.  That new format – featuring the presence of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, or the AP4, should have induced much head scratching.  But the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Washington’s beady eyes in Canberra, celebrated this “shift to taking a truly global approach to strategic competition”.

    NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is also much in favour of such competition, warning member states of Beijing’s ambitions.  “We should not make the same mistake with China and other authoritarian regimes,” he suggested, alluding to a dangerous and flawed comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan.  “What is happening in Europe today could happen in Asia tomorrow.”

    One of the prominent headscratchers at this erroneous reasoning is French President Emmanuel Macron.  Taking issue with setting up the Japan liaison office, Macron has expressed opposition to such expansion by an alliance which, at least in terms of treaty obligations, has a strict geographical limit.  In the words of an Elysée Palace official, “As far as the office is concerned, the Japanese authorities themselves have told us that they are not extremely attached to it.”  With a headmaster’s tone, the official went on to give journalists an elementary lesson.  “NATO means North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”  The centrality of Articles 5 and 6 of the alliance were “geographic” in nature.

    In 2021, Macron made it clear that NATO’s increasingly obsessed approach with China as a dangerous belligerent entailed a confusion of goals.  “NATO is a military organisation, the issue of our relationship with China isn’t just a military issue.  NATO is an organisation that concerns the North Atlantic, China has little to do with the North Atlantic.”

    Such views have also pleased former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, whose waspish ire has also been trained on the NATO Secretary-General.  In his latest statement, Stoltenberg was condemned as “the supreme fool” of “the international stage”. “Stoltenberg by instinct and policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen”. In thinking that “China should be superintended by the West and strategically circumscribed”, the NATO official had overlooked the obvious point that the country “represents twenty percent of humanity and now possesses the largest economy in the world … and has no record for attacking other states, unlike the United States, whose bidding Stoltenberg is happy to do”.

    The record of this ceramic breaking bloc speaks for itself.  In its post-Cold War visage, the alliance has undermined its own mission to foster stability, becoming Washington’s axe, spear and spade.  Where NATO goes, war is most likely.  Countries of the Indo-Pacific, take note.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The shooting of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, a young man of Algerian descent, during a traffic stop in a Paris suburb, has been characterized as a cold-blooded, point-blank execution and has catalyzed massive street demonstrations in cities across the country. Merzouk is the most recent victim of a 2017 law that loosened restrictions on the use of firearms by police in cases where a driver refuses…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ANALYSIS: By François Dubet, Université de Bordeaux

    Although they never fail to take us aback, French riots have followed the same distinct pattern ever since protests broke out in the eastern suburbs of Lyon in 1981, an episode known as the “summer of Minguettes”: a young person is killed or seriously injured by the police, triggering an outpouring of violence in the affected neighbourhood and nearby.

    Sometimes, as in the case of the 2005 riots and of this past week’s, it is every rough neighbourhood that flares up.

    Throughout the past 40 years in France, urban revolts have been dominated by the rage of young people who attack the symbols of order and the state: town halls, social centres, schools, and shops.

    An institutional and political vacuum
    That rage is the kind that leads one to destroy one’s own neighbourhood, for all to see.

    Residents condemn these acts, but can also understand the motivation. Elected representatives, associations, churches and mosques, social workers and teachers admit their powerlessness, revealing an institutional and political vacuum.

    Of all the revolts, the summer of the Minguettes was the only one to pave the way to a social movement: the March for Equality and Against Racism in December 1983.

    Numbering more than 100,000 people and prominently covered by the media, it was France’s first demonstration of its kind. Left-leaning newspaper Libération nicknamed it “La Marche des Beurs”, a colloquial term that refers to Europeans whose parents or grandparents are from the Maghreb.

    In the demonstrations that followed, no similar movement appears to have emerged from the ashes.

    At each riot, politicians are quick to play well-worn roles: the right denounces the violence and goes on to stigmatise neighbourhoods and police victims; the left denounces injustice and promises social policies in the neighbourhoods.

    In 2005, then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy sided with the police. France’s current President, Emmanuel Macron, has expressed compassion for the teenager killed by the police in Nanterre, but politicians and presidents are hardly heard in the neighbourhoods concerned.

    We then wait for silence to set in until the next time the problems of the banlieues (French suburbs) and its police are rediscovered by society at large.

    Lessons to be learned
    The recurrence of urban riots in France and their scenarios yield some relatively simple lessons.

    First, the country’s urban policies miss their targets. Over the last 40 years, considerable efforts have been made to improve housing and facilities. Apartments are of better quality, there are social centres, schools, colleges and public transportation.

    It would be wrong to say that these neighbourhoods have been abandoned.

    On the other hand, the social and cultural diversity of disadvantaged suburbs has deteriorated. More often than not, the residents are poor or financially insecure, and are either descendants of immigrants or immigrants themselves.

    Above all, when given the opportunity and the resources, those who can leave the banlieues soon do, only to be replaced by even poorer residents from further afield. Thus while the built environment is improving, the social environment is unravelling.

    However reluctant people may be to talk about France’s disadvantaged neighbourhoods, the social process at work here is indeed one of ghettoisation – i.e., a growing divide between neighbourhoods and their environment, a self-containment reinforced from within. You go to the same school, the same social centre, you socialise with the same individuals, and you participate in the same more or less legal economy.

    In spite of the cash and local representatives’ goodwill, people still feel excluded from society because of their origins, culture or religion. In spite of social policies and councillors’ work, the neighbourhoods have no institutional or political resources of their own.

    Whereas the often communist-led “banlieues rouges” (“red suburbs”) benefited from the strong support of left-leaning political parties, trade unions and popular education movements, today’s banlieues hardly have any spokespeople. Social workers and teachers are full of goodwill, but many don’t live in the neighbourhoods where they work.

    This disconnect works both ways, and the past days’ riots revealed that elected representatives and associations don’t have any hold on neighbourhoods where residents feel ignored and abandoned. Appeals for calm are going unheeded. The rift is not just social, it’s also political.

    A constant face-off
    With this in mind, we are increasingly seeing young people face off with the police. The two groups function like “gangs”, complete with their own hatreds and territories.

    In this landscape, the state is reduced to legal violence and young people to their actual or potential delinquency.

    The police are judged to be “mechanically” racist on the grounds that any young person is a priori a suspect. Young people feel hatred for the police, fuelling further police racism and youth violence.

    Older residents would like to see more police officers to uphold order, but also support their own children and the frustrations and anger they feel.

    This “war” is usually played out at a low level. When a young person dies, however, everything explodes and it’s back to the drawing board until the next uprising, which will surprise us just as much as the previous ones.

    But there is something new in this tragic repetition. The first element is the rise of the far right — and not just on that side of the political spectrum. Racist accounts of the uprisings are taking hold, one that speaks of “barbarians” and immigration, and there’s fear that this could lead to success at the ballot box.

    The second is the political and intellectual paralysis of the political left. While it denounces injustice and sometimes supports the riots, it does not appear to have put forward any political solution other than police reform.

    So long as the process of ghettoisation continues, as France’s young people and security forces face off time and time again, it is hard to see how the next police blunder and the riots that follow won’t be just around the corner.The Conversation

    Dr François Dubet, professeur des universités émérite, Université de Bordeaux. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.


  • This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Climate change campaigners targeted the UK headquarters of oil giant TotalEnergies with paint on 27 June. They were protesting the French firm’s alleged human rights violations in the construction of its oil pipeline in Uganda.

    Supporters of Just Stop Oil sprayed black paint in the interior lobby of the company’s headquarters in London’s Canary Wharf district. Others daubed orange paint on its exterior, according to the protest group.

    London’s Metropolitan police said officers had arrested 27 people:

    for a combination of suspicion of criminal damage and aggravated trespass.

    EACOP

    Dozens of students from Students Against EACOP also massed outside the building during the stunt to show support. The pressure group is opposed to the building of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP)

    TotalEnergies is the largest shareholder in the climatologically disastrous East African venture. The project is set to carry crude oil to the Tanzanian coast through several Ugandan protected nature reserves.

    Communities in the region claim the energy firm and other EACOP backers have caused serious harm to their rights to land and food in building the 930-mile pipeline.

    Critics have called the project a “carbon bomb” which would release over 379 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.

    An end to oil and gas exploration

    Related action took place on the same day in mainland Europe. On 27 June, in France, a group of Ugandan citizens and aid groups, joined by French aid organisations, filed a lawsuit in a Paris court against TotalEnergies for damages over the alleged human rights violations.

    Campaign group Oil Change International has calculated that TotalEnergies’ planned expansions would:

    lead to over 1,600 million tonnes (Mt) of carbon-dioxide (CO2) pollution over their lifetimes, if the projects’ oil and gas reserves are fully extracted and burned.

    Just Stop Oil wants the UK and other governments to end all new oil and gas exploration. The campaign has promised not to let up in its high-profile protests until it does so. The action on 27 June is just the latest in Just Stop Oil’s campaign of direct action, which shows absolutely no signs of stopping soon.

    Featured image via Screenshot

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • A few weeks back, a video surfaced on social media, which showed a knife-wielding man stabbing people, including toddlers and an elderly man, in a playground in Annecy, France. The man was identified as Abdelmasih Hanoun (31), a Christian Syrian refugee. In the video, Abdelmasih Hanoun is reportedly heard yelling “In the name of Jesus Christ!” while he carries out the act. BBC reported that the suspect himself mentioned that he is a Syrian Christian. The suspect was later arrested by French police for attempted murder, and the prosecution said that his actions did not seem to be linked to terrorism. But a section of media and social media users have claimed that the man is actually a Muslim whose real name is Selwan Majd.

    Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, an American far-Right anti-Muslim conspiracy blog, tweeted an image of the suspect with the caption, “An Atrocity in Annecy” and added the link to an article of the same title on June 12. The report mostly revolves around the assumption that there is a possibility that the alleged attacker is originally Muslim and the media is deliberately portraying him as a Christian. (Archive)

    On June 13, Jihad Watch published another article titled: “France: ‘Christian’ who stabbed children on playground turns out to be a Muslim named Selwan Majd” which was basically an English translation of a report from a French website called Resistance Républicaine, a far-Right site known for sharing Islamophobic content. Robert Spencer tweeted the link to the article. The tweet has received over 4 million views and has been retweeted over 24,000 times. (Archive)

    The report says, “From the beginning we said that it cannot be a Christian… and that it has the signs of being done by a Muslim…” It also mentions that Abdelmasih Hanoun is actually Selwan Majd and he travelled to Turkey with false papers that would show him as a Christian and got married in Sweden with a false Christian name. The report, however, does not cite any source for the information.

    Click to view slideshow.

    Indian Twitter handles such as @JIX5A, @MeghUpdates, @RituRathaur, @AmitLeliSlayer also shared the link/screenshot to Jihad Watch’s report. Some other prominent international Twitter handles also shared the same including Britain First, a far-right British political party, @AzzatAlsaalem, @EvaVlaar, @ElijahSchaffer.

    Click to view slideshow.

    Elish Yako, the national general secretary of an NGO called Association d’Entraide aux Minorités d’Orient, shared a series of tweets in this regard claiming that the alleged Annecy stabber was indeed a Muslim. — According to its website, the NGO provides aid to eastern minorities, mostly to Christians. (Archive 1, 2, 3)

    To support his claim, Yako mentions that they could not retrieve the man’s baptism or celibacy certificate from Syria and that in his marriage certificate, he had left the boxes for the date and place of birth and identity of his parents empty.

    Click to view slideshow.

    Fact Check

    The Resistance Républicaine report mentioned that Abdelmasih H. met and married his now ex-spouse in Sweden under a false Christian name and that he was not granted Swedish citizenship because the country’s officials doubted him. To check this claim we ran a relevant keyword search that led us to several news reports with details of the matter.

    As per a news report by Le Monde, a French daily afternoon newspaper, according to the information provided by the suspect’s mother, he was born in Syria in 1991 and served in the Syrian army. In 2011, he left the country when the civil war broke out and moved to Turkey where he met his future wife who was also a Syrian. The couple moved to Sweden together in 2013, got married and had a child, who is presently three-year-old. Later, the couple got divorced when Abdelmasih H. couldn’t get Swedish citizenship. He later moved to France and applied for citizenship there for the first time in November 2022.

    In another report, Le Monde mentioned that Abdelmasih’s former wife herself obtained Swedish nationality in June 2021, six years after being granted a permanent residence permit. In November 2013, Abdelmasih H. received a permanent residence permit in Sweden. His first application for nationality was submitted in October 2017 and quickly rejected as one needs to have lived in Sweden for at least five years to be naturalized. He tried again in August 2018 but did not receive any response. He appealed again in 2021. Finally, on February 11, 2022, the Swedish Migration Agency rejected his application.

    Le Monde accessed the ruling by the Swedish Migration Agency where the Swedish authorities justified their refusal on the basis that Abdelmasih mentioned in his application that he had served in the Syrian Military in 2011 and 2012. After a 2004 government decision, any applicant for naturalization “who has been active in, or had a decisive influence on, an organization whose activities are believed to have included systematic, widespread and flagrant abuses such as torture, murder and extrajudicial executions cannot be granted Swedish citizenship unless a specified period of time has elapsed”. This period has been set at 25 years. Several Human Rights organisations find the Syrian army guilty of committing war crimes and of human rights violations.

    Click to view slideshow.

     

    Therefore, the claim that the Swedish authorities doubted that he pretended to be a Christian and hence rejected his citizenship application or that he first met his now ex-spouse in Sweden is false. The couple met in Turkey and moved to Sweden together.

    We further came across a report by a French fact-checking organisation called Liberation which also refuted the claim that the assailant was a Muslim whose real name was Selwan Majd. In their article, Resistance Républicaine also mentions that their claim will soon also be confirmed by relatives of Father Boulad in Alexandria. The fact-check report highlighted that the mentioned priest passed away recently and was known for his Islamophobia.

    We also found a tweet from BFM TV, a French news channel, from June 8. When they reached out to Abdelmasih’s ex-wife, she told the interviewer that she had met her ex-husband in Turkey and that he was a Christian. She also said that he was from the city of Al Hasakah in Syria. When asked if Abdelmasih H. was ever such a violent person, she said that he was never like that and that he was a good father to their child.

    As per our findings so far there is no evidence that would suggest that the Annecy stabbing suspect is a Muslim person called Selwan Majd. The suspect who was arrested by the French officials is Abdelmasih Hanoun who is a Syrian Christian.

    In the past as well, Jihad Watch had shared misleading reports targeting the Muslim community. One of Robert Spencer’s tweets, in which he shared a misleading report relating a crime of attempted murder to ‘Jihad’ or terrorism, received a comment from Twitter owner Elon Musk. Musk’s one-character comment (just an exclamation mark) was enough to give the misleading tweet a boost in terms of its reach. The tweet has received 3.2 million views and has been retweeted over 10,000 times. At present, it comes with a ‘community note‘ that contradicts Spencer’s claim. (Archive)

    The post France knife-attack: Suspect a Syrian Christian; False ‘Jihad Watch’ report calling him a Muslim viral in India appeared first on Alt News.

    This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.

  • Jean Eustache’s famous elegy for a left-wing generation is, at its heart, reactionary.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • By Finau Fonua, RNZ Pacific journalist

    New Caledonian Joe Xulue has made history by becoming the first person of Kanak heritage to graduate from Harvard University in the United States.

    During his graduation in Boston on June 6, he proudly wore the Kanak flag as he received a diploma in law — and photos of the moment have since gone viral, celebrated by fellow Kanaks across social media.

    Xulue said his accomplishment is collective because it sets an example to fellow Kanaks.

    “It’s a win for all Kanak people,” said Xulue.

    “I see it as a service — a way of giving back to my community — even by just going to Harvard . . . it can mean a lot to a young Kanak kid who is unsure of the dreams and aspirations that they have about themselves,

    “When I was up there holding the flag, despite alot of the things that my people have gone through because of colonisation, it felt so proud to showcase how much we can achieve.

    “Getting to Harvard wasn’t easy, I’ve had to go through more rejection than acceptance to get to where I am today.”

    Joe Xulue poses with his wife Yasmin at Harvard University
    Joe Xulue with his wife Yasmin at Harvard University . . . “It’s pretty clear that colonisation has dis-enfranchised so many of our people.” Image: Joe Xulue/RNZ Pacific

    An avid New Caledonia pro-independence supporter, Xulue said his and other Kanak successes contributes to the indigenous movement for self-determination.

    “It’s pretty clear that colonisation has dis-enfranchised so many of our people,” said Xulue.

    “Young Kanaks like me are trying to change the narrative — to effectively reverse years and years of colonial rule, and policy guidelines and directions that have left us in a poor state.”

    The French territory has seen recent political turbulence, with pro-independence supporters disputing a referendum in 2021 that rejected independence from France.

    Political dissatisfaction is widespread among the Kanak people who inherit a history marred by war and oppression. The majority of native Kanaks, who make up over 41 percent of New Caledonia’s population, support independence.

    Xulue is one of them, and he said getting a Harvard degree is one way of improving the socio-political condition of Kanaks.

    “This idea of a neocolonial territory to exist in a world where we are supposed to be allowing countries to have independence is disconcerting,” he said.

    “I find it so strange that a country like France will talk about equality and freedom for all, but won’t guarantee it to a nation like New Caledonia where they can clearly see the effects of colonisation on an indigenous group.

    “On one hand, the French government talks about freedom and rights, but they don’t guarantee them to people who inherently deserve those rights.”

    Outside Harvard University in Boston on the day that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern received an honorary doctorate.
    Outside Harvard University in Boston on graduation day when former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern received an honorary doctorate. Image: Harvard Gazette/Kris Snibbe/RNZ Pacific

    Harvard is a vehicle for change
    Before going to Harvard, Xulue completed a law degree at Auckland University — a hub for Pasifika academics.

    He applied to Harvard after being encouraged to do so by others including Samoan Harvard graduate Dylan Asafo.

    A key focus of his study was creating cultural spaces to improve justice systems.

    “My application was based on the idea of using indigenous ideas and practices, to shape the more traditional legal structures that we have in New Zealand,” said Xulue.

    “That was the basis for why I wanted to study and I knew it would give a platform to the Kanak struggle for independence.

    “We see alot of the ways that different tikanga practices are in the New Zealand justice systems . . . we see how changing the settings like allowing for the kaumatua to get involved or allowing for the marae for youth justice processes can occur . . . simple ways we can use indigenous knowledge within the current colonial hegemony.”

    “I look at the law as a tool to effect positive change for our people . . . I think that’s what Harvard saw and why they accepted me into their university.”

    The French president Emmanuel Macron (centre) and overseas minister Annick Girardin (right) meet with Kanak leaders at the customary senate in Noumea, the capital of New Caledonia.
    French President Emmanuel Macron (centre) and overseas minister Annick Girardin (right) meet Kanak leaders at the customary Senate in Noumea, the capital of New Caledonia. Image: Twitter/@EmmanuelMacron/RNZ Pacific

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • By David Robie

    New Caledonia’s Kanak national liberation movement has told the UN Decolonisation Committee that France has “robbed” the indigenous people of their independence and has appealed for help.

    Magalie Tingal-Lémé, the permanent representative of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) at the UN, told a session of the Committee of 24 (C24) — as the special decolonisation body is known — that the French authorities had failed to honour the 1998 Noumea Accord self-determination aspirations, especially by pressing ahead with the third independence referendum in December 2021 in defiance of Kanak opposition.

    More than half the eligible voting population boycotted the third ballot after the previous two referendums in 2018 and 2020 recorded narrowing defeats for independence.

    The pro-independence Kanak groups wanted the referendum delayed due to the devastating impact that the covid-19 pandemic had had on the indigenous population.

    Tingal-Lémé told the UN session that speaking as an indigenous Kanak woman, she represented the FLNKS and “every time we speak before your institution, we carry the voice of the colonised people”.

    “When we speak of colonisation, we are necessarily speaking of the people who have suffered the damage, the stigma and the consequences,” she said in her passionate speech.

    “On September 24, my country will have been under colonial rule for 170 years.”

    Accords brought peace
    Tingal-Lémé said two political accords with France had brought peace to New Caledonia after the turbulent 1980s, “the second of which — the Nouméa Accord — [was taking] the country on the way for full emancipation”.

    “And it is in a spirit of dialogue and consensus that the indépendentistes have kept their word, despite, and in the name, of spilled blood.”

    In 2018, the first of three scheduled votes on sovereignty, 56.4 percent rejected independence with an 81 percent turnout of the 174,995 voters eligible to vote.

    Two years later, independence was again rejected, but this time with an increased support to almost 47 percent. Turnout also slightly grew to 85.69 percent.

    However, in December 2021 the turnout dropped by about half with most Kanaks boycotting the referendum due to the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, this time the “yes” vote dropped to a mere 3.5 percent.

    “Since December 12, 2021, when France maintained the third and final referendum — even though we had requested its postponement due to the human trauma of covid-19 — we have never ceased to contest its holding and its results,” Tingal-Lémé said.

    Nearly 57 percent of voters had not turned out on the day due to the covid boycott.

    ‘We’ll never accept this outcome’
    “We believe that through this illegitimate referendum, the French state has robbed us of our independence. We will never accept this outcome!

    “And so, unable to contest the results under French internal law, we are turning to the international community for an impartial institution to indicate how to resume a process that complies with international rules on decolonisation.

    “Through the Nouméa Accord, France has committed itself and the populations concerned to an original decolonisation process, which should lead to the full emancipation of Kanaky.

    “Today, the FLNKS believes that the administering power has not fulfilled its obligations.”

    Tingal-Lémé said the “latest evidence” of this failure was a New Caledonian decolonisation audit, whose report had just been made public.

    She said this audit report had been requested by the FLNKS for the past five years so that it would be available — along with the assessment of the Nouméa Accord — before the three referendums to “enlighten voters”.

    “The pro-independence movement found itself alone in raising public awareness of the positive stakes of self-determination, and had to campaign against a state that sided with the anti-independence groups.”


    Magalie Tingal-Lémé’s speech to the UN Decolonisation Committee. Video: MTL

    Entrusted to a ‘market’ firm
    Also, the French government had “entrusted” this work to a firm specialising in market analysis strategies, she said.

    “This shows how much consideration the administering power has given to this exercise and to its international obligations regarding the decolonisation.

    “Frankly, who can believe in the objectivity of an audit commissioned by a government to which the leader of New Caledonia’s non-independence movement belongs?” Tingal-Lémé asked.

    “It is already clear that, once again, France does not wish to achieve a decolonisation in the Pacific.

    “This is why the FLNKS is petitioning the C24 to support our initiative to the United Nations, with the aim of getting an advisory opinion to the International Court of Justice.

    “The objectives of this initiative is to request the ICJ to rule on our [indigenous] rights, those of the colonised people of New Caledonia, which we believe were violated on December 12, 2021.”

    Advisory opinion
    The FLNKS wanted the ICJ to make an advisory opinion on the way France “has conducted the decolonisation process, in particular by holding a referendum without the participation of the Kanak people.”

    Tingal-Lémé pleaded: “We sincerely hope that you will heed our call.”

    According to New Caledonia’s 2019 census, the indigenous Kanaks comprise a 41 percent share of the 271,000 multiethnic population. Europeans make up 24 percent, Wallisians and Futunans 8 percent, and a mix of Indonesians, ni-Vanuatu, Tahitians and Vietnamese are among the rest.

    Earlier today, RNZ Pacific reported that a New Caledonian politician had claimed at the UN that the territory was “no longer a colony” and should be withdrawn from the UN decolonisation list.

    The anti-independence member of the Territorial Congress and Vice-President of the Southern Province, Gil Brial, said he was a descendant of French people deported to New Caledonia 160 years ago, who had been “blended with others, including the indigenous Kanaks”.

    He said the only colonisation left today was the “colonisation of the minds of young people by a few separatist leaders who mixed racism, hatred and threats”, reports RNZ Pacific.

    Dr David Robie is editor of Asia Pacific Report.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • When one of the world’s most developed culturally elite countries, France, tosses in the towel on the IPCC 2°C barrier, it sends a loud and clear message that the global warming fight is losing the battle.

    Seriously, France expects 4°C. The country is bracing for 4°C according to Environment Minister Christophe Béchu: “We can’t escape the reality of global warming.” (Source: ‘We Can’t Escape the Reality’: France is Preparing for 4°C of Warming by 2100, Euronews.green, May 22, 2023).

    France’s position on global warming is heavily influenced by other countries failing to deliver their targets to keep temperatures within the 1-5°C-2°C range of the Paris Agreement. “Unless countries around the world intensify their efforts to cut emissions further still, we are on track for global warming of between +2.8 and +3.2 degrees on average, which means +4 degrees for France because Europe is warming fast,” Béchu said,” Ibid.

    The question going forward will be how to keep the electrical grid functioning as global warming diminishes water resources crucial for nuclear power, and as the aging fleet corrodes (37 years median age). France leads the world in nuclear power at 70% of total electricity generation. Yet, in a strange twist of fate, nuclear power, falsely advertised as clean green energy, is vulnerable to global warming shutdowns.

    The French Court of Auditors’ Report on the Safety and Operation of France’s Fifty-six (56) Reactors highlights an increasingly unstable supply of water necessary for cooling reactors. (Source: “Climate Change, Water Scarcity Jeopardizing French Nuclear Fleet,” Balkan Green Energy News, March 24, 2023)

    The Loire River is the longest river in France at 625 miles. As of early 2023, global warming clobbered the river, some areas completely dry with flow rate down to 1/20th of normal. Significantly, some of the country’s nuclear power plants depend upon the river for cooling purposes. Global warming is threatening France’s nuclear power system. So far, forced shutdowns have only occurred in the summer, but France’s Court of Auditors warned that such events are likely to become 3-to-4 times more frequent unless global warming somehow subsides, yet France’s environmental chief thinks 4°C is on the horizon.

    Moreover, for the first time since 1980, France has been a net importer of electricity, losing its 40-year net exporter status. Output shrank 23% because of a double whammy: (1) global warming diminished water resources, and (2) corrosive defects in infrastructure as a result of the tension and stress of creating energy via nuclear fission, as a dozen reactors were shutdown. One-half of France’s nuclear fleet was shut down at times during 2022.

    In the face of its most challenging hottest year on record, France is throwing in the towel on 1.5°C and 2°C above pre-industrial, the upper band as suggested by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Notably, anything above 2°C is considered trouble for life-supporting ecosystems. In fact, the world today at only 1.2°C above pre-industrial is already experiencing trouble in many instances, e.g., losing the water towers of Europe, the Alps, way too fast. The European continent runs hotter than the world at large. According to the World Meteorological Organization, temperatures in Europe have increased at more than twice the global average over the past 30 years. Meanwhile, with global warming walloping Europe last year, it nearly slid off the map.

    With France convinced 4°C is in its future, it should be noted that there are plenty of credible scientists who believe 2°C above pre-industrial is simply intolerable, hmm. For example: A recent study entitled “Assessing Dangerous Climate Change” by James Hansen (Columbia University) Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia University) Camille Parmesan (University of Plymouth), et al (18 scientists) claims that governments have set the wrong target to limit climate change at “2°C higher than the average for most of human history… consequences can be described as disastrous.” With a 2°C increase “sea level rise of several meters could be expected,” and several species will be decimated.

    The Hansen study pulls no punches, 2°C above pre-industrial is too high. It should be noted that Dr. Hansen correctly warned the U.S. Senate in 1988 of the dangers of global warming, subsequently front-page news for the New York Times: “The greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.” His warnings then as head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies are evident today. If only America’s highest-ranking politicians had listened and reacted, but they didn’t.

    France is taking on the global warming challenge by opening a public consultation process thru the summer months to work at defining a nationwide adaptation plan as global warming is expected to trigger several events: (1) severe heatwaves will last up to two months (2) southern portions of the country can expect up to 90 nights with tropical temperatures per year (3) the west and south will experience longer more extreme droughts (4) water shortages will become severe.

    2022 Hottest Year Since 1900

    National weather agency Météo-France claims 2022 ranks as the hottest year ever recorded in France since data collection began in 1900. It was a year (2022) of multiple extreme disasters as excessive global warming hit hard, e.g., three suffocating heat waves over 33 days, temperature records smashed with many cities exceeding 40°C. (Source: 2022: “The Hottest Year Ever Recorded in France,” Le Monde, Jan. 6, 2023)

    France is gasping from a dire water shortage with hundreds of towns and villages left with no tap water as ‘ogre’ wildfires rip across the country for the second time this summer in a ‘vision of hell’… The entire nation is suffering its worst drought on record with restrictions in place to limit water usage, but for more than 100 parched communes, they don’t even have the option to ration their supply. French environment minister Christophe Béchu said it is a ‘historic’ crisis for so many communities to have no tap water at all, as fleets of vans ferry bottled water to the desperate residents. (Source: “‘Monster’ Wildfire Incinerates French Wine Country: France Desperately Sends in Reinforcement Firefighters as Ten Thousand Flee, While Record Drought Helps Kill Tons of Fish in Germany Amid Summer ‘Extremes Not Seen Before,” Daily Mail, August 11, 2022)

    The ’vision of hell’ experience and trucking water to hundreds of parched communities is/was a wakeup call, and that experience “has prompted concerns over water security across the continent.” (Source: “France Heading Towards Worse Summer Drought Than 2022, Geological Service Says,” Reuters, April 13, 2023)

    If 2022 was a disaster year with Europe’s temps above the global average of 1.2°C pre-industrial, what on earth can the French expect with 4°C looming?

    A 4C World

    The World Wildlife Foundation published a study of various scenarios of temperature ranges: Backgrounder: Comparing climate impacts at 1.5°C, 2°C, 3°C and 4°C.

    4°C looks like this: (1) 3/4ths of the world population will have deadly temperatures for at least 20 days every year, e.g., a heatwave in Karachi, Pakistan killed 1300 people in 2015; at 4°C Karachi would get hit with deadly heat for 40 days straight. (2) major portions of the world will be hit with horrific food shortages (3) all of Europe will experience water shortages (4) hundreds of millions of people at risk of sea level rise with 760 million in high-risk coastal city locations (5) one-half of all plant and animal species at risk of local extinction, and alas (6) adaptation to 4°C may not be possible. In which case the first 5 examples may not matter all that much!

    According to a World Bank analysis: “There is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible…the projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur,” Ibid.

    Even with worldwide awareness of global warming, it is still important to recognize the fact that climate change is a fickle public issue with plenty of ammunition for deniers and doubters to cast spells: “not to worry, the climate always changes.”

    Studies suggest that people, not wanting to deal with a nearly impossible situation, block out the challenges of climate change. And as such, they are susceptible to any public statement that gives some comfort that it’s not all that bad. For example, “the climate always changes,” implying that it’s done this same thing over and over again, but we are still standing. However, that statement leaves out a crucial fact. It leaves out the rate of change. It’s one thing when it takes a thousand years to naturally increase CO2 at the rate of 0.02 ppm per year, thus impacting temperature levels gradually. It’s an altogether different case when its human-driven 100 times faster at 2.0 ppm, which is today’s rate, thus compressing 1,000 years into 10-to-100 years. From most signals in France today, the compression factor is looking more severe yet, just ask France’s environmental minister about the rate of change.

    Excessive levels of greenhouse gases are the culprit: “In the 1960s, the global growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide was roughly 0.8± 0.1 ppm per year. Over the next half century, the annual growth rate tripled, reaching 2.4 ppm per year during the 2010s. The annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age 11,000-17,000 years ago.” (Source: “Climate Change: Atmosphere Carbon Dioxide,” Climate.gov, May 12, 2023)

    Here’s more unsettling paleoclimate history from Climate. gov: “Carbon dioxide levels today are higher than at any point in human history. In fact, the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts were this high was more than 3 million years ago, during the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period, when global surface temperature was 4.5–7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5–4 degrees Celsius) warmer than during the pre-industrial era. Sea level was at least 16 feet higher than it was in 1900 and possibly as much as 82 feet higher.”

    To repeat the facts just described in the former paragraph, which are difficult to accept: Three million years ago, atmospheric CO2 was the same as today. It was 2.5-4°C warmer than today’s pre-industrial basis with sea levels at least 16 feet higher.

    Maybe France is right, 4C could be low. Only time will tell. Today’s global heat is a product of CO2 from a decade ago. There’s a lag time that’s roughly 10+ years (source: Institute of Physics) between CO2 emissions and the subsequent temperature impact… buckle up!

    Meanwhile, when nuclear power plants go down and drinking water is delivered via truck to hundreds of cities and towns in G7 countries, like Italy and France, the underlying message is silent and unspoken. There’s nothing more to say.

    A Cool Solution

    James Hansen has issued a draft paper entitled Global Warming in the Pipeline, Cornell University, May 2023 that answers the question of what must be done. An enormous drawdown of CO2 is required to cool the planet: “A new plan is essential. The plan must cool the planet to preserve our coastlines. Even today’s temperature would cause eventual multimeter sea level rise, and a majority of the world’s large and historic cities are on coastlines. Cooling will also address other major problems caused by global warming.”

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.