A masked young lad is filming from his seat on a runaway tourist train as it careens through the Paris streets. “Waaaooh” he shouts as it whizzes along, waving at other kids dressed all in black, to the sounds of cheering. His eyes tell the story – he’s high as a kite on adrenaline and the unexpected joy of total freedom, unshackled, for a fleeting moment, from the grinding manacles of economic necessity.
He is one of tens of thousands. They’ve filled the streets for weeks, clambered onto statues, fought the cops, made demands for their futures. As police violence has escalated against them, they’ve fought back in kind under the slogan “if we burn, you burn.” An increasingly literal interpretation as public buildings collapse in flames. The youth in full, uninhibited revolt the likes of which we haven’t seen for many years.
And their furious rebellion has been caught by the wind, spreading across Europe, reflecting the economic and social malaise that afflicts the entire Western hemisphere, a crisis of capital and demographics that States have decided the young must bear and fix, white offering nothing in return. The motivation for that delirious nihilistic moment of a stolen buggy rampaging down cobbled tourist streets, a wild young man hollering to the crowds, is as understandable as it is universal.
But the kid is brown, and that’s all the excuse the commenters need.
Similar can be found under every news item posted by every news organisation. They’re not protesters, they’re jihadis taking their chance. They aren’t French students, they’re Muslim foreigners. Never mind that in every video we can see how young the people kicking off are, never mind how many white faces are all over the place, never mind what the demands are or the many anarchist and socialist slogans that have been daubed on every wall.
For those of us with a bit of grey along their temples, the words sound all too familiar. We hear some variation on the theme whenever any social rebellion begins, from Hosni Mubarak and pals during the Egyptian revolution in 2011 to Donald Trump shrieking about anteefa after the January 6th riots. It’s the elites’ favourite excuse – outside agitators. It can’t be what it looks like, we must unite against an amorphous, pernicious alien influence and, merely by happy accident, preserve the status quo.
Blah blah blah. It’s as tiresome as it is predictable. We know it’s bullshit. So why are the far-right’s socials full of exactly that rhetoric?
