Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> If any other president from any other civilized country would have sent the military to guard against its citizens' street protests [1] then that president would have been (rightly) called out the worst names

Burning cars and breaking windows isn’t peaceful protest. If that happened in New York and the mayor and governor didn’t deploy armed guards, up to and including the National Guard, many people would be rightfully furious.

The difference is America, being a federation, has many layers of armed police, from the NYPD to NYPD special ops to the National Guard to the FBI and Marshalls to the Army. France, being more unitary (departments don’t have National Guard analogues), escalates more quickly to deploying its military.

View on HN

France has many levels of police, too. Most countries have similar federations as in your US example. In France, the CRS is a reserve force of the national police who specialize in crowd and riot control. If you've ever been to a sporting event in Paris (or a train station during one) you'll see dozens of CRS there keeping order. And they're not the actual military.

> Burning cars and breaking windows isn’t peaceful protest.

Neither is burning people alive in Caracas, but that doesn't stop Macron from supporting the riots in Venezuela.

> Burning cars and breaking windows isn’t peaceful protest.

A few people doing that doesn't invalidate a peaceful protest that has lasted months now without doing any major damage (if you exclude Macron's approval ratings, of course).

Of course, when you have a lot of upset people it's easy to have a few problems--specially after months of protesting without the government doing anything major to address people's concerns.

It's also a common tactic from governments to infiltrate into peaceful protests and cause damage and disorders on purpose, to have an excuse to use force against protesters. In Italy it's common practice to send the secret service to attack the Police, and then reply with beating everyone up. Some politicians have even confirmed this practice in the open (Cossiga, for example).

> that doesn't invalidate a peaceful protest

I agree. Peaceful protest with violent elements, and the government deploying force to deter the violent elements, isn’t an oxymoron. The violent elements don’t invalidate the peaceful ones. And the armed response shouldn’t besmudge the government per se.

> It's also a common tactic from governments to infiltrate into peaceful protests and cause damage and disorders on purpose

Need a citation on this being “common.” Would also need some proof of this happening in Paris. Otherwise, we’re going into conspiracy theory land.

Given the violence made France look more inept than any of the demands did, given Paris gave into many of the policy demands, and given France’s fourth estate is reasonably competitive and competent, I’m sceptical of the claim that the looting was a false flag operation.

> Need a citation on this being “common.” Would also need some proof of this happening in Paris. Otherwise, we’re going into conspiracy theory land.

I'm not familiar with the French secret service, but since I've seen proof of this technique being regularly deployed in other countries it would just seem common sense to me to think that the French would do the same.

Cossiga's "confession" is even on Wikipedia (https://it.wikiquote.org/wiki/Francesco_Cossiga), he said in short: "the best is doing what I used to do when I was interior minister: let them protest, send the Police home and infiltrate protests to make them destroy the city. Then, when they lost the public opinion's approval, beat them up until they can't walk and the protest is over."

I think it's just normal business.

> I've seen proof of this technique being regularly deployed in other countries it would just seem common sense to me to think that the French would do the same

Italy has well-known corruption and mafia problems. Its press is less free than [1] and political system quite different from France’s. Even then, its frequency of violent protests is much higher than that of false flag operations.

Globally, there are more examples of peaceful protests becoming violent than of false flag operations. One’s prior should default to the former while being wary of the latter.

[1] https://rsf.org/en/ranking

> Globally, there are more examples of peaceful protests becoming violent than of false flag operations.

Not saying anything about France, but what was your prior that led into determining this? Your prior shouldn't be just as questionable as the problem you're using it for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com