It’s like I used to tell my social science students (high school level): the French knows how riot. I mean wearched up to the king in 1849 and said “no more power for you, sign this constitution and we can go home in time for wheel of fortune”… The French litt the streets on fire and killed their oppressors.
I need to find that clip of French firefighters protesting. The police tried to disperse the firefighters with tear gas and batons. But the firefighters had respirators, protective clothing and teamwork. So when the police pulled up like " here try this tear gas" they didn’t expect the firefighters to go “nice deodorant, here hold this flaming pallet for me, while I pelt you with more stuff that’s on fire”
nice deodorant, here hold this flaming pallet for me, while I pelt you with more stuff that’s on fire
This stuff is worthy of !BrandNewSentence@lemmy.today
Apparently, it’s not just bears that will bluff a charge.
Pigs do too.
The motherfuckers blinked and they’ll never be able to intimidate in this way again
They’re all cowards, every last one. All cops.
Well, that’s embarrassing. That crowd wasn’t the tiniest bit intimidated.
I’m not sure why France gets such a bad rap about being pussies. These seems pretty fucking metal to me. A buncha pure badasses. Oh and fuck these douchebag cops.
US propaganda. The Italians used to be the stereotypical cowards until France refused to join the invasion of Iraq.
Have some…
Spoiler
Freedom
fries
“Cheese-eating surrender monkeys” long predates the Iraq war. It comes from their surrender in WWII. Yes, the jokes ignore their resistance movement and the fact that they basically lost an entire generation of young men to WWI. It also ignores that Britain failed to help France.
I have never in my life heard of Italians being stereotypical cowards.
Intelligence sharing and participating in “defensive” NATO operations that France did is still considered being involved and participating in the war
French politicians are the cowards. The people have always been hard as nails.
Plus they are the gold standard for protests. Both in method and motivation.
It’s only the Americans. Not sure why either. Historically and always, the French go hard.
It’s especially weird because the French going hard is how the colonists got carried to US independence.
I think it’s a relatively more recent thing where US conservative anti-France propoganda was very successful when they refused to support one of the US wars in the middle east. Can’t remember which but it’s where terms like “freedom fries” started popping up and then I think some people retconned France getting their shit pushed in early in WWII as somehow meaning they surrender easily even though in reality they were bearing the brunt of the Nazi invasion. But yeah without the French there would be no USA.
The Iraq war. And 20 years later JD Vance said that if Europe were real friends, they wouldn’t have let the US drive drunk and go into Iraq.
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WW2 raised a generation of poor young farmers out of that life and into one where they went and liberated a country they probably didn’t know anything about.
They didn’t know/care that France actually has a pretty impressive military track record.
So, they come home telling everyone that the French sure don’t know how to put up much of a fight, are helped to become successful in life (unless they were black), and their dumb kids all assume they can kick France’s ass, because they’re weak.
Americans saw the French as surrending cowards due to WWII, long before the while Iraq thing. I have no idea why there are two people in these comments pushing this claim that it’s due to the Iraq war.
The jokes were always ignorant, but they’ve been around since WWII.
Because that’s when the tone shifted from friendly ribbing (well it wasn’t that friendly, but “nah, nah, we saved you in that war”) to more of an enraged “if you aren’t with us, you’re against us”, even though France was far from the only ones that refused to join the invasion of Iraq.
And Trump took that tone change and applied it to pretty much everyone else.
Those are completely separate things. American right wingers were pouring out wine and throwing cheese away as a “fuck you” to the French who dared not support GWB. These were the days when I regularly read “if you don’t support our President, you’re not a real American.”
It had nothing to do with France’s history. If Germany refused to back us, right wingers would have been selling or crushing their BMWs and Mercedes in a performative fashion.
This is just how the right wing behaves. If they don’t get what they want, they demonize whoever didn’t support them. It’s the same way that Trump runs everything: like a petulant mob boss.
Germany not only refused to back you but joined France in opposition to the invasion. Belgium also opposed. Canada didn’t back you either, though we didn’t oppose it, just sat it out entirely. But I only recall France getting shit on for it.
Thank you for proving my point.
We were given a goddamn national mascot statue and this is the thanks they get
Its reverse psychology, works wonders
By whom? Uneducated americans? That’s your answer
This message sponsored by the British government?
We will NEVER forget the history!
Because if this was America, people would be dead.
Seriously, I respect the French here… But this is why. Police and even many citizens are brutal in the US. I’m guessing other places that say these things about the French are the same.
Maybe the police don’t kill in France because they know they’d get killed too if they crossed that line. Just a speculation. I’m not sure how many protesters have ever been killed in France.
Here’s one which is not directly the police but it’s kinda because it’s who the police really works for:
- After the 2007 Crash, whilst in Britain the rich were asking for even more tax breaks (and, by the way, got them whilst the rest of the population got Austerity), in France the rich were very publicly saying they should be taxed more.
Now, even if the rich in France were being totally hypocrites in their “demands” and knew the politicians they owned would not actually do it (which was what happened), why would at least some of the rich in France feel the need to very loudly and publicly ask to be taxed MORE even whilst in next door Britain the rich very openly wanted to be made even richer?!
Methinks it’s to do with the invention of monsieur Guillot and with the French tradition of the common people taking it to the streets and breaking shit up (and, on occasion, said shit being actual rich people) unlike both the UK and US (both countries which even by comparison with the wider Europe beyon France, have very meek and compliant populations).
That said IMHO, Macron’s winning against the Gillet Jaunes has seriously reduced the fear the French elites have of public reactions to their abuses.
Real talk, what makes protests in France so different than the US? At every protest I’ve seen or been to in the US, protesters are almost always at the mercy of the police. Of course there is often pushback, but it doesn’t take much until police are beating, arresting, and less-than-lethaling everyone in sight until protesters are inevitably split up, whittled down, or otherwise herded to where they can be more easily rounded up by police. I’ve seen cops back down before but it’s almost always only temporarily until they can get more reinforcements, and while I know on paper the people outnumber police, there always seems to be more police available.
Territory size, is my guess. Both Russia and the US have relatively compliant populations, but also huge tracts of land. That makes it harder for relatively small communities to have “ownership” of their political masters. When the guy at the top can literally be at the other side of a continent, you can’t threaten him with the guillotine. This prevents a sense of community and shared responsibility from being developed, both for the people and their leaders.
You have to team up with strangers in a far off place and ask them to fight on your behalf - and there is little guarantee you can offer the same favor in return. Thus, the leadership is insulated from consequences. So long as they have freedom of movement, leaders are free to do as they wish.
There are many forms of power, and we must limit them for our leaders if we want our peoples to have a better future. Movement, money, breadth and depth of influence, all must be limited for those who lead.
When the system is threatened police are always the same . One of the worst was g8 protest in italy in 2001
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/17/italy.g8
Stefan Bauer dared to answer back: when a German-speaking guard asked where he was from, he said he was from the European Union and he had the right to go where he wanted. He was hauled out, beaten, given a face full of pepper spray, stripped naked and put under a cold shower. His clothes were taken away and he was returned to the freezing cell wearing only a flimsy hospital gown.
Shivering on the cold marble floors of the cells, the detainees were given few or no blankets, kept awake by guards, given little or no food and denied their statutory right to make phone calls and see a lawyer. They could hear crying and screaming from other cells.
Men and women with dreadlocks had their hair roughly cut off to the scalp. Marco Bistacchia was taken to an office, stripped naked, made to get down on all fours and told to bark like a dog and to shout “Viva la polizia Italiana!” He was sobbing too much to obey. An unnamed officer told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that he had seen brother officers urinating on prisoners and beating them for refusing to sing Faccetta Nera, a Mussolini-era fascist song.
Ester Percivati, a young Turkish woman, recalled guards calling her a whore as she was marched to the toilet, where a woman officer forced her head down into the bowl and a male jeered “Nice arse! Would you like a truncheon up it?” Several women reported threats of rape, anal and vaginal.
fucking hell…It amazes me how they manage to find worst of the worst for police departments.
It’s pretty logical to conclude that the kind of police officers who chose to become shock police (as in Europe they tend te be a separate part of the police who are trained to break up demonstrations) are the ones who, at best, are fine with beating people in exchange for they themselves getting paid more money than regular police, and at worst actually enjoy it.
They’re a self-selected group of people from low empathy all the way up to violent psychopaths (the in Psychology called “functional”, in that can control themselves enough to only act on their impulses when they can legally do it).
So, yeah, give such people not just de facto immunity for their actions (which extends even to killing people as long as it can be seen as accidental - as happened in the UK a few years ago) and even actual orders to harm people and they’ll do it and then afterwards go back home and sleep like babies.
Where as I would agree, I still find it very scary that they can so easily cross the border between being brutal and enjoying torture
Well, Civilization is the only thing that stops those who enjoy torturing others from being brutal and, lo and behold, those holding power have de facto created various classes of people who have immunity to the mechanisms of civilization that stop them, one of said classes of people being police officers in certain countries, certain positions in the force and/or certain time periods when politicians in power suspect the rules for them.
That such is at all possible is all part of the overall problem that even in supposedly Democratic nations “civilization” is mainly talk and that whatever of it actually exists is a thin layer. In fact I would go as far as saying that at this moment in time even in some supposedly democratic countries the organised violence of the State is in practice less civilized than the ah-hoc retributive violence of the masses would be - in other words those who enjoy torture, as long as they occupy certain positions in the state apparatus have less to fear if they act such sick wishes than they would have in past times when the state did not have a monopoly on violence and the populous was free to themselves take care of retribution.
For all the messaging (especially in films) that the past was unjust and violent, in some countries the only real difference there is now a thick layer of bureaucracy disguising the de facto immunity of certain people from societal retribution and claiming it’s “justice” when anybody trying to exercise retribution is fallen upon by the structures in power like a ton of bricks, whilst in the past it wasn’t at all hidden that the minions of the powerful could do whatever the fuck they wanted and there was nothing that rest to could about it - in other words, what before was open that “some are not bound by the same rules as others”, now there’s a lot of sing and dance to disguse that “some are not bound by the same rules as others” and the violent suppression of any attempt at making it otherwise as being the very opposite - all part of a societal agreed system to do what’s Just which “represents the common will” and is always right.
ACAB Everywhere
Why am i not surprised?
American cops will happily blind or cripple you for life, and will never see any consequences for doing it. It happens so regularly that it’s considered expected, and the media doesn’t even bother to report on it. If you read that there was a large protest in America, you can just assume that the cops removed some eyes and limbs, and permanently damaged lungs with chemical agents.
I’d say guns make the difference. When there’s a chance that someone in the mob might pull out a gun, police are going to shut that down much more brutally. And protesters know this brutality as well, so they don’t let it come that far either…
Judging by what the Black Panthers used to do, it’s almost the opposite: when the other side pops up with guns (which in many places in the US is entirelly legal), the police suddenly loses the will to beat people up.
Well, I imagine, when it’s an angry mob where you don’t expect anyone to start shooting, but you don’t know for sure, then you gotta do your job and try to avoid it escalating by shutting it down as hard as possible. But if you know that the group is willing to shoot, then you’d rather lose your job than your life, so abandon ship as quickly as possible…
You’re operating under the incredibly incorrect assumption that US riot cops are there to protect people. They get off on hurting and maiming people, it’s specifically why they took the job.
I think the exact same thing applies as it did in Uvalde Highschool - the cops don’t want to get shot so they come up with excuses not to intervene thus reducing the risk of getting shot.
In the case of a demonstration their “intervention” would actually be to hurt and even harm those demonstrating, hence them not intervening is a good thing for just about everybody, in the case of Uvalde their “intervention” would probably have saved lives so them not intervening resulted in more lives lost.
Either way, the individual police officers are just following “I only care about what best for me” logic and that can be used by demonstrators to influence the actions of the police, which what IMHO the Black Panthers did.
possibly more accountability
Fascists expect other people to be cowards like they are, unfortunately…
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This profile, good grief
Remember when France deployed tanks and killed thousands of protestors in the 90s. No, because China did that.
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