French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday, February 14, urged calm and restraint after the fatal beating of a 23-year-old French youth aligned with the far-right on the sidelines of a conference by a hard-left lawmaker in the southeastern city of Lyon.
The death of the young man – identified only as Quentin – has intensified tensions between France’s far-right and radical left who are both eyeing 2027 presidential elections.
He had been hospitalized in Lyon on Thursday after being attacked while providing what his supporters said was security for a protest against an appearance by hard-left MEP Rima Hassan at the Lyon branch of the Sciences Po university.
Unfortunately, optics are incredibly important to win public opinion. As a radical leftist myself, I have little to no compassion for the man who died ; nonetheless I hope this doesn’t start a pattern.
Many people see these things as entirely vibes-based, so if we don’t look like the good guys, to many people that’s enough to decide we aren’t the good guys.
I think the world needs less radical left and more militant left.
We’ve tried talking for the last 80 years or so. Its not working so well. So maybe we need to bring back the violence that defeated fascism last time.
If you’re going to adopt violence, you have to target the exact right people or you just plunge yourself into a long, dumb spiral of public outrage until whatever the organization originally meant to accomplish is lost in the news cycle of violence. People won’t remember what you represented, only what you did. And you can’t fix that with messaging, it’s just not how it works.
I can name a dozen different iconic seditious or rebellious groups in recent history and for every name read, you will see in your mind’s eye terrorism and bombings and violence, not what that group wanted to accomplish or what their goals were.
I get gnashing teeth reminding people of this fact, but Mussolini was not defeated by a plucky band of rebels who dragged him out of his bunker, he was arrested by his own king and government and handed over the opposition. We still need political action or we’re just embracing mindless chaos, we will need politics to both secure an actual victory and we will need politics to deal with the millions of people who didn’t vote for any of your actions but will still live next to us after.
“The means are the end,” to quote a line from The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin (anarchist and legendary fiction writer). While I agree that we need most parts if the left for revolution (Andor does a decent job demonstrating this), I’m highly skeptical that lasting change can be built on revolution that is primarily enacted through violence.
Mmh… I think that tribal identification is a basic problem (the us vs their conundrum): the danger is obvious, admit this general simplified view to conform the “only two collectives” and judge them by choiced individuals and not by the root ideas and what they bring, if humans cannot overcome this instinct they will remain ants that follow queens for no good reason…
The problem of course is that, bad as it may be to think this way, people (including me !) absolutely do think this way by default, unless consciously making the effort not to.
Maybe this can be deconstructed, but until then we need a good dose of “Realpolitik” that takes those biases into account, at least if we want to achieve anything concrete.
There is some truth to the “us vs them” between elites and the people, and the current elite is (somehow) very good at making a big part of the people they oppress think that “actually, you’re part of the elite too !”