{"id":119580,"date":"2021-04-13T15:02:22","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T15:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=185778"},"modified":"2021-04-13T15:02:22","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T15:02:22","slug":"macrons-collusion-with-covid-has-not-destroyed-frances-spirit-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/04\/13\/macrons-collusion-with-covid-has-not-destroyed-frances-spirit-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Macron\u2019s collusion with COVID has not destroyed France\u2019s spirit"},"content":{"rendered":"
Yet hadn\u2019t he told us on the first day of March that we should \u201chold on\u201d as \u201cin four to six weeks\u201d the country would be opening up? That had been the tenth time since the start of the epidemic that he, or one of his ministers, had offered the lie that the end of the tunnel was just a few weeks away. His 31 March lockdown announcement contained the 11th<\/sup>: France would have to \u201clive with the virus, it\u2019s like that\u201d but the controls he was applying to the whole of the country would be relaxed as from mid-May, a mere six weeks away.<\/p>\n He rubbed salt into the public\u2019s wounds by talking of \u201ccollective choices we have made\u201d when in fact they are taken by him in the enclave of a \u2018Health Security Council\u2019 whose deliberations are covered by military defence secrecy rules. No wonder opposition deputies and senators of Left and Right walked out when his prime minister Jean Castex turned up to get a parliamentary rubber stamp on decisions Macron had already taken.<\/p>\n Collusion with the virus<\/b><\/p>\n If one knows that a danger is looming but one does nothing about it, at what point does knowledge and involvement make the move from complacency to connivance and, ultimately, to collusion with the forces ensuring that a threat becomes a dominating, fatal reality? That question has been posed twice before the French public this past month.<\/p>\n The French drug company Servier was finally convicted after a two-year long trial for selling its diabetes drug Mediator despite accumulating evidence of its potentially fatal side effects. At least 500 died, some suggest 2,000. In the words of the judgement, \u201cDespite knowing of the risks, they never took the necessary measures and so were guilty of deceit\u201d.<\/p>\n In that instance, direct responsibility cannot be laid at a French president\u2019s door. In the case of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, it can, that of socialist president Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand. A commission of historians established two years ago by Macron reported that it could find no document in the archives it was able to see, that proved a \u201cwillingness to be associated in the genocidal enterprise\u201d of the regime Mitterrand had been financing, arming, training, all but cuddling, amid escalating racist violence (\u201ctribal conflict\u201d in the vocabulary of Mitterrand, \u201cethnic purification\u201d for his generals).<\/p>\n