The current bout of rioting in France raises the questions the news does not really seem to have drilled into – namely who or what is really behind all this agitation?
The media narrative spontaneous “people power” – all the more pure because it has no leaders – seems very lazy. Such protesting is also portrayed as a quintessentially part of french culture. The causes of the protests, where they are mentioned at all, is little more than a bingo sheet of the popular disaffection with “metropolitan elites” narrative we have endured over Brexit vote and Trump’s election. In retrospect we now know various actors have attempted to influence people over social media.
In France the protests are apparently organised over facebook, itself a reason to doubt its legitimacy. We can establish a few facts about the yellow vests and facebook:
- We know that the quality of life in the West is declining due to environmental and social pressures and those who the British press call JAM’s (Just about managing) are unhappy at their circumstances. France is no different to other countries in that regard. It does not follow that people will natural support street violence – the 2011 riots in the UK, for example, were roundly condemned.
- There is no reason to believe President Macron is more divisive, or less popular, than other national leaders. The UK for instance has a very fractious government and socially divided population thanks to leaving the EU, the legitimacy of the latter also damaged by a shadowy campaign managed through social media.
- It is now established facebook is a shoddy organisation, and their website employs dubious programming in which generating social friction is the means to the end of creating increased user interaction via the website.
- It is also demonstrable fact that facebook has been cracked wide open by the Russians and others who use it as a kind of information warfare tool to subvert democracy. Brexit and the election of Trump both bear the fingerprints of Russian interference.
- The “Colour revolutions” that took place in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and other places burned the Russian attempts to maintain ties with the former soviet republics. Arguably these revolutions, which Russia blames on Western NGO interference, was the genesis of the current Russian propaganda efforts against the West. It would hardly be surprising if they tried the same tactics against the West when the opportunity arose.
To summarise, we already know that popular disaffection does exist, and have seen how it can be harnessed by external actors to achieve the social disruption that enemies of Western democracy so crave. Why would the Yellow Vest protests be any different?
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