Croon It Again: Daniel Cohn-Bendit Is Scandalised by French Protesters

Talk about irony! 'Danny the Red', at the forefront of the Red Summer of '68, condemns les Gilets Jaunes.

From A Political Refugee From the Global Village

Daniel Cohn-Bendit - Danny the Red - is the man of 1968, the Parisian revolutionary, whose name everyone remembers. Even I do and I was only 6 at the time. He is now, like many far leftists, a Green Party politician. By a delicious irony that historians will relish, he has angrily condemned the Gilets Jaunes, the Yellow Jackets, as the people in the French countryside are known who are protesting against Macron's stinging taxes on diesel fuel.

This remark of his symbolises everything about what is happening and will happen.

The world in which we are living is the world dreamt of by the 68-ers: internationalist, post-colonial, multiracial, feminist, classless, sexually permissive, post-Christian, druggy, etc, etc.

The 1968 revolts were childish but hugely influential. Remember in 1968 students demonstrated against capitalism in West Berlin, protected by the American, British and
French armies from real existing socialism. The ideas of the 1968-ers' enemy De Gaulle, a Catholic patriot who wanted a Europe of nations and dreaded mass immigration by Arabs, have been defeated in every sphere except in economics.

And what goes around, comes around.  Now the left is the establishment and is facing revolting peasants who have had enough of it all.

It is not about fuel tax or tax but a revolt against elites that have failed the people and the peoples. The same thing is happening everywhere in Western Europe and in many countries in Eastern Europe (though not in Romania, which avoids conflict with foreign powers, until she abruptly changes sides). It is even, astonishingly, happening in the Catholic Church, though that is an absolute monarchy.

President Macron was until a moment ago disconcertingly impressive. He intends to save the European project and is the only figure in sight who might do so. He has said that Matteo Salvini of Italy is his enemy and that nationalism is treason.

I am a monarchist and legitimist rather than a nationalist, but nationalists in this context does not mean revolutionaries fighting against the Habsburg or British empires, but means people who love their nations and don't want to lose them. It is vital for people like me who dislike the way the EU has turned out and dislike mass third world migration into Europe that President Macron fails. It looks like he might.

Macron (the ultimate populist who created his own party and came to power out of nowhere) won the presidency by a landslide because he was in the second round of the French presidential election against the Front National. He scored less than 25% in the first round and only won because of dirty tricks by President Hollande's secret service, who destroyed Francois Fillon's chances. If he fails it may be the turn of the other kind of populists.


Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, in a good article called In France, les deplorables strike back in the New York Post:

"None of the President’s decisions please anyone in the country, save the clone-like Macronista hipsters in Paris and a few large cities. They are men and women in their 30s and 40s — affluent, well-educated, in competitive jobs, able to afford the crazy rents in places like Paris, Bordeaux or Lyon."

Brendan O'Neil blocked me on Facebook when I pointed out that his hero, Leon Trotsky, was worse than General Franco, but I hold no grudge. He is right about most things and being on the left allows him carte fairly blanche. His comment on the protests is accurate.

"For years we have lived in a climate of ‘You can’t say that’. You can’t criticise mass immigration — that’s xenophobia. You can’t oppose the EU — that’s Europhobia. You can’t raise concerns about radical Islam — that’s Islamophobia. You can’t agitate against climate-change policy — that’s climate-change denialism, on a par with Holocaust denialism, and anyone who dares to bristle against eco-orthodoxy deserves to be cast out of polite society. And yet now, in this populist moment, people are daring to say precisely these unsayable things. They’re standing up to the EU. They’re demanding that immigration become a democratic concern rather than something worked out for us by unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels. And now they’re even grating against the hitherto unquestionable religious-style diktat that we must all drive less, shop less and do less in order to ‘save the planet’.


"Of course the gilet-jaunes revolt isn’t just about fuel tax. It expresses a broader sense of public anger with the new political class and their cult of bureaucracy, their preference for technocracy over democracy, their gaping, astonishing distance from the concerns and beliefs of ordinary people. In essence, the people’s revolt against Macronism speaks to a profound crisis of legitimacy among the 21st-century political class and a willingness within the public to kick up a fuss about things they might previously have been silent about."