Ici commence l'aliénation

Alienation starts here: one of the slogans of the 68 uprising, in which French students and workers united against the capitalist regime of Charles de Gaulle, which they saw as neo-fascist, with some strong evidence in their favour, and as the local manifestation of systematize oppression. Over a period of months, strikes, riots and savage police violence brought France to the brink of revolution, only for minor reforms to buy off the voters.

Do I sound wistful? I am of course. Before we were all bought off with consumerism, the 68ers had the intellect, the vision, the strategy and the bravery to force bourgeois capitalist democracy to reveal its contradictions and hypocrisies. Not just in France, but in the US, across the developing world and even in the UK. The moment passed, but it can be revisited, even improved upon. The witty, spontaneous UK Uncut and the student protesters of last year were hopefully merely the beginning. We may be cowed by our narrowed imaginations, our debts and our manners, but we all have the potential to express ourselves with the joyous rage of Mai '68. We mustn't nostalgically revisit 68, but we should remember that cowed acceptance is not the way it's always been.

Here are some of the posters produced by the Atelier Populaire during the evenements of 1968.

Be Young and Shut Up. 

Have an iPhone and leave the politics to the grown-ups.

They revolutionnaires believed that French tertiary education removed potentially troublesome individuals from their class, nipping rebellion in the bud: it was time to reconnect the proletariat with the student body. It worked for a time too, though there are always points of tension (even Chaucer's students are smartarses).

Or as another slogan had it: the owners need you: you don't need the owners.

What distracts the population? Racial antagonism, foreign wars, TV, minor concessions. Sound familiar?

Systems are automatically oppressive. Foucault called them 'disciplinary systems' and they certainly are still in play here.

Time to end the exclusive and ideologically conservative nature of education and make it a public right, available to all. Time to revive this one, I feel.

A new hero for the Pantheon

I just read a fascinating interview with Eva Joly: French fraud prosecutor, Green politician and French presidential candidate.

She has some very trenchant things to say about civilisation, taxation and the UK's government. I wonder if we can arrange some kind of transfer over here.

We have been living in a kind of collective illusion that this is how the world is — that the poor shall always be poor, ordinary people shall be squeezed to the benefit of a kind of oligarchy."

…of the UK's non-dom tax arrangements for the super-rich ("This is a serious hole in European tax co-operation").

Plans to save money by merging the SFO and other agencies into a new economic crime agency concern Joly. "I think it's a scandal. What sort of society are we creating? All over the world, the powerful don't want economic crime investigation."

Some of her most swingeing analysis is reserved for the Britain's failure to tame the forces in the Square Mile. "Your political and business elites are asking for sacrifice, asking to close down public services – you are cutting the number of public sector jobs by 400,000. Why don't your politicians have the courage to recover taxes in order to be able to pay for the schools, the teachers, the hospitals? To me, tax is civilization. It is the basis of your social contract."

The decision by the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, to delay implementing the Bribery Act, passed in the dying days of the Labour government, enrages Joly. "We have been waiting for that how long? 20 years?"

Om Bongo, Om Bongo, he steals it from the Congo

I'm so sorry, I couldn't resist that slightly dated and quite racist mass culture reference, but it's so apt.

You see, Wikileaks reveals that the President of Gabon, Omar Bongo, was astonishingly corrupt (not very surprising), that he stole money from the pooled funds of several countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo - a simple rule of thumb is that the more adjectives in a country's name, the less likely they are to be true: think UK, GDR, DPRK etc. - and gave some of it to Sarkozy's party in France (which stinks to high heaven already).

A senior official at the Bank of Central African States (Beac) told a US diplomat in Cameroon of Bongo's "brazen" defrauding of the bank which holds the pooled reserves of six central African countries, including Gabon, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Shortly after Bongo's death in 2009, the US embassy in Yaounde said the bank source told them: "Gabonese officials used the proceeds for their own enrichment and, at Bongo's direction, funnelled funds to French political parties, including in support of French President Nicolas Sarkozy."

Still bitter about this

Thanks to Em for passing this on. At least the French didn't waste their undeserved place at the World Cup, eh?

A quality bit of Irish sporting humour

Emma sent me this today - Anita informs that it's been floating around, under various guises, for a good few years. Funny if you like sporting rivalries and find Sarkozy risible.

Scientologists stung

The French, not keen on cults (ask the Cathars), have convicted the Scientologists of organised fraud! The organisation hasn't been closed down, but it has had to reform. In other news, Hollywood bloke Paul Haggis (made Crash, though I prefer his work on Due South) has resigned, having realised (after a couple of decades) that Scientology isn't very nice.

Now this is proper sleaze

Our politicians (in Britain and Ireland) are often shallow, careerist, greedy, arrogant and sometimes corrupt. However, it's sometimes instructive to look elsewhere for comparison, and a couple of stories provide the opportunity to do just that.

Over in Italy, the Prime Minister owns most of the TV, radio and print media, and controls the state channels. He's been accused of consorting with prostitutes, very young girls, evading taxes, dealing with extremely shady elements, and a British government minister's husband has been convicted of accepting a bribe to lie for him. He also thinks it's hilarious to joke that Obama has a 'good tan'. Now his immunity from prosecution while prime minister (a law he passed to protect himself) has been declared unconstitutional, and he's very upset…

Meanwhile in France, the Minister for Culture's autobiography reveals that he was in the habit of paying Thai 'boy' prostitutes a few years ago…

La Police Vous Parle

The rozzers have been extremely active on the PR front recently, so I thought I'd show an earlier reaction to authoritarian propaganda, from the 1968 student insurrection.

Bonjour, ça va?

I appear to have readers in la belle France et le Canada francophone - so bienvenue, mes amis quebeçoises et françaises, and keep rioting (the British are so useless that the best the sacked BMW workers could do today was to throw fruit at their bosses)!

Free the Tarnac 9

Well, after that bracing holiday, I'm back and raring to lacerate someone with mildly barbed commentary. First up, the French.

No, not on the usual lines (garlic, surrender, strikes, arrogance). I like those aspects of that country. When de Gaulle despaired of being able to govern a country with 300+ cheeses, I thought he was mad - why would you not want to? I like French bloody-mindedness, their concern for food and quality of life (lunch with red wine or an e. coli sandwich at your desk?)  and their love of an old-fashioned, all-in demonstration or riot. 

Which is what brings me to whinge about our cousins now. In the past, they've had a healthy hard left shading into revolutionary factions. They even gave sanctuary to various Italians who'd had, shall we say, an interesting 1970s. But now, the party est finie. The freelance left may be coming back but the French government has decided that under the guise of 'extremism', they can nick everybody who doesn't want to go to Disneyworld Paris - even the inoffensive anarchists of Tarnac who allegedly delayed a train and may (or may not) have had a hand in writing 'The Coming Insurrection', a rather sweet neoTrotskyist tract which shares some values with my mother's terrorist sect, the Women's Institute. 

What the Tarnac 9 seem to have done is lived The Good Life - gone to a depopulated area of France (Limousin) and joined the remaining locals in making their village viable again - which seems rather in keeping with the new spirit of the times, given that globalisation has allowed the stupidity of a tiny élite of financiers to push the entire global economy into recession. In return, the police judiciaire swooped in full anti-terrorist gear and kidnapped nine of them: the Swiss sitcom actor, the clarinettist, the archaeologist, the student nurse and the grocer amongst them… dangerous criminals all. I bet their veg boxes were packed with loads of subversively-shaped goodies. Perhaps even a sausage hiding the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies…

However, Sarko is determined to prove that he's a forward-thinking rightwing global capitalist like… er… Tony Blair just in time for the New 1930s. Hélas

Some of the Tarnac 9, plotting another fiendish outrage