Turning Back the Revolution

For a rare nation steeped in principles of freedom, equality and brotherhood, the notion of martial law is beyond anathema, and any overt attempt to transfer the cherished power of the people to an arm of individual suppression is bound to end badly.

Not entirely unlike the majority of non-metropolitan British, the greater number of French people I knew or worked with felt that their capital, Paris is a lair of the ‘fou’ – the mad – and I was once told, in the presence of a gendarme attempting to take a statement with two fingers on an antique typewriter, that people only become policemen if they are too stupid to be priests.

As the history books have shown, when the French are not happy, they don’t moan and commiserate, they act. Memories of the tumbrils are usually more than enough to encourage the oppressors to back down, whether they vaguely consider increasing fuel prices for hauliers to be met with blockades throughout the country, or attempt to establish a branch of the globalist Macdonald’s in the timeless paysage of Larzac only to arrive in the morning to find the building unscrewed.

Following the imposition of martial law, the people have been on the streets in ever increasing numbers, fielding more than a million protesters, many of whom have been abused and physically attacked by petrified and ill-deployed riot squads, while the world’s television looked the other way in collusion with the members of the ‘fou’ responsible for that deployment.

The last time any of France’s towns and villages were patrolled by people with guns was during the Occupation – something we (outside of the Channel Islands) managed to avoid, though it’s easy to understand the nightmare effect on those who lived under it.

The latest atrocity, which took place in Nice, adds insult to injury by, not only giving the excuse for a continuation of this malign presence, but by occurring on the day that is the very symbol of la République and its raison d’être, July 14. No date in the calendar brings the people of the country together in the same way, for fireworks and celebrations and a national outpouring of shared pride in their history and their achievements.

There is a heavy liability on those who look upon events such as this from a distance and in the context of other such occurrences. The victims and their relatives and loved ones suffer enough without the likes of us butting in. But truth, however impalatable, is the only solvent that will remove such stains from the future, albeit almost impossible to accept that soldiers, citizens and police are dying and suffering for a lie, a cock-eyed political – even commercial – ideology that demands such sacrifices to feed some kind of hideous PR campaign.

BBC’s Radio 2 news reported that the sorry contingent of ‘fou’ that arrived for the memorial and minute’s silence was met with boos and cries of ‘Murderers!’, so there can be no doubt that those in attendance made a solid connection between them and the terrible event, the assumption being that France’s mind-numbingly stupid foreign policy was the prime mover in making it the favourite resort of ‘Islamist terrorists’ (as the BBC likes to call them).

As if to confirm their worst opinion of him, M Hollande immediately gave orders to step up the idiocy as a kind of surreal ‘reprisal’.

Just so we’re all clear on the logic of this: western country bombs middle-eastern country or countries with which it has no argument into submission. Middle-eastern country or countries (apparently) retaliate in some small way by an attack on the aggressor’s own population. Western country now has the justification it needs to continue its bombing. It’s in retaliation (obviously) for the retaliation and the victim of the initial aggression has only himself to blame.

But there’s more to the cries of ‘murderer’ than that, and too many other suspicions hanging in the air, such as the cry from the authorities of ‘Islamic terrorist’ before anyone had even pieced together what had happened.

What had happened on the surface was that a lorry had careered through the dispersing crowd, mowing them down as it went. The driver didn’t appear to have made any effort to stop, and the thing was not brought to rest until the omnipresent riot police fired numerous rounds into its windscreen – most of them into the passenger (right-hand) side of the cab, where the driver of the standard French (left-hand-drive) lorry could be assumed not to be.

Unless they had foreknowledge and/or instructions, they would not have any good reason to believe that the rampage was intentional. The brakes could have failed. None of the heavily-armed and trained ‘security’ personnel present fired at the tyres – a standard way to bring a vehicle to a standstill that would have arrested its passage, intentional or otherwise.

So, at the very least, populating the place with armed bozos did not prevent any of the above.

The lorry, which travelled over two kilometres during its rampage, was allegedly driven by a petty-villain by the name of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a French-Tunisian not known to have any religious leanings. He was considered anti-social and well-known to the local police, but hardly regarded as a threat.

How and why did he metamorphose into the villain of this particularly hideous piece?

‘Radicalisation,’ comes the reply.

If you’ve ever had any dealings with psychiatrists or psychologists, you might already be smelling something fishy at this point. A terminology that has sprung into being in the service of ‘explanation’ that explains nothing – exactly the standard pattern of cooked up mental ailments and psychologically constructed ‘motives’.

A ‘radicalised’ person has no beliefs, thoughts or conclusions of his own until one day he receives a revelation that makes him abandon his life to a pointless cause  that will be least served by the bonkers suicidal action it drives him to undertake.

As an example of how genuine and helpful a designation the term is, here is a list of some of the behavioural elements to look out for in order to identify someone going down with radicalisation (courtesy of the West Midlands police):

Asking for their passport and other important documents like birth certificates

Saving money

Buying new clothes

Paying off bills

Researching travel plans online

Researching online, goods & clothes to take (binoculars, maps, boots, first aid kit)

You might think this would sound more like someone planning a holiday rather than a terrorist atrocity but, like me, you’re probably not an ‘expert’.

Petty-ASBO-man Bouhlel got radicalised and stayed home.

So we come at last to the question everyone should have asked in the first place: ‘Who would, could or did benefit from this atrocity?’

‘ISIS’ allegedly claimed responsibility after the event, but it was never other than a rag-tag of fighters with no real plan or leadership, not likely to have a bureau on French soil able to coordinate something of this sort, even if they felt it worth dissipating their energies, although they might have jumped at the PR – supposing, of course, that it helped their cause in some way. What way is not clear. They haven’t even managed to keep the same name long enough to have it painted on the side of their American trucks.

And why keep targeting France? Like Britain, it is only hanging on the coat tails of the real aggressor in their homelands.

The only rational explanation is that it is a disciplinary action.

Governments in Britain and Germany can introduce something as half-assed as austerity economics and the population thinks (if that’s the word) that it’s probably for their own good.

Although everyone else blames them for Europe, the response of the French people to the creeping fascist state has been and continues to be a rude gesture.

The powers-that-be did remarkably well in utterly suppressing coverage of the mass protests that followed their initial attempts at martialisation, but they won no hearts or minds in the monde actuel.

Nice was another stage in the ill-conceived (US style) plan to wear them down, and it will only serve in the end to add more steel to their determinism to maintain what they have won and preserved since the days Asteryx saw off the tiresome Romans.