Christening A Warship: What's Wrong With This Picture?

Gov. Janet Mills at the podium, Senators Susan Collins and Angus King seated at right.

Yesterday, General Dynamics in collusion with the U.S. Navy held a "christening" of their latest warship, a nuclear-capable Aegis Destroyer attended by elected officials.

After decades of determined protest and, at times, civil disobedience leading to arrests outside Bath Iron Works' gates, the shipyard's glorifications of war making are no longer open to the general public. (They're also announced at the last minute in obscure channels, so how our group is able to get wind of their plans in time to organize a response is anybody's guess.)

That 24 of us gathered on short notice was one of the things right about yesterday. (Protester Bruce Gagnon's favorable report is here.)

Some of what was wrong:

🕱 Christening is an obnoxious term for naming a ship that will be used to menace China. 

Jesus Christ taught turn the other cheek and love one another. Co-opting his name to do pr for your nuclear weapons system is obscene.

🕱 The destroyer is named after a Vietnam war "hero" (an oxymoron if there ever was one) who's incidentally still living and attended the ceremony. Most people who could remember the moral stain of the U.S. proxy war on China using Vietnam are dead. So, imperial narrative managers figure it's time to refurbish the reputation of a wildly unpopular war that killed millions, poisoned thousands with chemical weapons, and spread cluster bombs that are still killing people in neighboring Laos and Cambodia.

🕱 The cost to the U.S. taxpayer for this warship: around $2 billion.

🕱 The Pentagon just failed its fifth audit, so we'll probably never know why the ship cost so much. The U.S. military also just got the biggest budget ever authorized by Congress, a whopping $832 billion, and an undercount at that as nuclear weapons are funded through the Department of Energy budget.

🕱 As a friend pointed out to the reporter for the Times Record yesterday,

Outside the shipyard celebration, Mary Beth Sullivan of Brunswick was one of about 20 people who gathered to protest, holding signs that decried military spending and aggression.

"The money should be going to human needs in our own community," Sullivan, a social worker, said. "We could be building solar panels or windmills. There're so many other projects we could be building if only we had a different mindset.

There's so much profit in war."

🕱 The reporter chose to follow MB's quote with a rebuttal from Senator Angus King who was in attendance to kiss the ring of General Dynamics:

"There are people who say we shouldn’t spend so much money on defense and we shouldn’t build these ships,” King told the crowd. “The problem is there is evil and aggression in the world. If there’s any doubt of that: Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The whole purpose of building this ship is notifying our adversaries … we have the capacity to punish them if they commit an act of aggression against the United States or its allies.

We are building these ships so they will never have to be used.”

🕱 King was there to demonstrate that no matter whether you have an I (he's an independent), a D (Governor Janet Mills), or an R (Senator Susan Collins) after your name, the war machine owns you.

🕱 All military contracting is sold to local entities (who are then pressured to cough up tax rebates for the wealthy corporations they are lucky enough to attract) as a good jobs program. It is nothing of the kind, producing the lowest number of jobs generated per dollar invested in various economic sectors.

🕱 Ramping up a World War 3 with China is the Pentagon's worst idea yet. If an Aegis is capable of carrying nukes, how is China supposed to know that a war ship menacing the South China Sea isn't about to annihilate Beijing?

🕱 The environmental destruction to places like Gangjeong Village on Jeju Island in South Korea via construction to port U.S. war ships is tragic.

🕱 The climate harms of U.S. militarism are well-documented yet never included in the corporate news reporting that puffs gala events like the war ship celebration.

I'll leave you with more of what went right:

☮ We did get a bit of coverage in local newspapers, both in advance and on the day of -- which amplifies our messages considerably. (Kudos in particular to George and Maureen Ostensen for their publicity efforts.)

☮ A local talk radio show had me on prior to the event to talk about how and why we protest war ships.

☮ A lot of wisdom was shared in our closing circle (depicted above is Mair Honan, who moved many of us by speaking about war-induced grief).

☮ Many hundreds of celebration-goers, cops, security guards, and passers-by saw our messages. Some honked and waved, or thanked us for being there. 

☮ Our presence demonstrated that it's possible to dissent from sailing full speed ahead toward nuclear world war.

BARBIE & OPPENHEIMER Are Both Sophisticated Propaganda Vehicles

I can hear you saying, "I get that OPPENHEIMER could be soft propaganda for nuclear weapons use but BARBIE??" And I'm right there with you -- because not everything that comes out of Hollywood is propaganda for the U.S. empire's war machine.

Unless it is.

Bear with me while I notice that 

a) BARBIE is stirring up controversy over a map that is glimpsed showing a nine-dash line delineating areas in the South China Sea right off the coast of China and 

b) U.S. client countries like the Philippines are lining up to ban BARBIE because they object to where the line is.

Here's the non-fanciful map that NPR (National Pentagon Radio) served up in early July to accompany their article linked above:

Here's another map I saw this morning that may have some relevance here:

Pew Research map shows unfavorable views of China are rather uneven worldwide and furthermore suggests that propaganda works. The highest percent of those viewing China unfavorably are in U.S. client states Australia and Japan, followed by U.S. client state Sweden, followed by the U.S. itself.

Heck, even false stories about the Barbie movie are helping to fan the flames of the map controversy.

It's evil, but I have to admire the empire's narrative management strategies.

As for OPPENHEIMER? Don't get me started. While sheepdogs for the Democratic Party insist the movie is required viewing and sure to turn anyone anti-nuclear, sharper analysts reach different conclusions. 

From indigenous activists Klee Benally and Leona Morgan:

To glorify such deadly science and technology as a dramatic character study, is to spit in the face of hundreds of thousands of corpses and survivors scattered throughout the history of the so-called Atomic age.

Think of it this way, for every minute that passes during the film’s 3-hour run time, more than 1,100 citizens in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki died due to Oppenheimer’s weapon of mass destruction. This doesn’t account for those downwind of nuclear tests who were exposed to radioactive fallout (some are protesting screenings), it doesn’t account for those poisoned by uranium mines, it doesn’t account for those killed during nuclear power plant melt-downs, it doesn’t account for those in the Marshall Islands who are forever poisoned.

Of course the real power of propaganda is directing our attention, both away from inconvenient truths and toward a version of reality that benefits the powerful.

I'll leave you with this example from popular culture aimed at young kids: 

This is  from a picture book for children, Diary of a Spider, published in 2011 by Scholastic. I could do an entire blog post on that corporate entity's penetration of U.S. public schools with turn key book fairs that sell a myriad of pro-military and pro-empire books. 

Soft propaganda starts early and it never sleeps. 

Australia Gets U.S. Warship Of Its Own -- Yup, You Read That Right

What was U.S. Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy so pleased about in this picture? The commissioning of a U.S.-built war ship for Australia to use called the U.S.S. Canberra.

It will be ported in Australia as that is much, much closer to China than any U.S. port. And it is festooned with this symbol of Australia's subservience to the U.S. war machine now doing business as AUKUS:

Does a stars and stripes kangaroo look like a joke to you? You cannot make this stuff up.

A less flashy but probably more egregious violation of Australia's sovereignty is the news that it is slated to become the nuclear waste dump of the AUKUS alliance.

From Crikey originally but it's paywalled, so here's the whole article reposted to MSN.com.

Seeing this news reminded me of an item I saw earlier in the week regarding Australia's unique global position for rocket launches. At think tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), U.S. Space Force director of staff Lieutenant-General Nina Armagno told Aussies, "Australia is sitting on a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for our common national security interests."

Two major parts of a shared US–Australia space capability centred on surveillance and tracking of objects in space are now up and running near Exmouth in Western Australia. One is a C-band radar that was based in Antigua and has been relocated to WA, and the other is the Space Surveillance Telescope, originally developed by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The telescope is run as a joint facility and recently achieved its initial operating capability.

Who funds ASPI? Australia's Department of "Defence" plus plenty of corporate entities that would love to get their hands on some of that gold.

More from ASPI: 

Australia’s growing space industry will almost certainly welcome any moves to expand US–Australia launch collaboration, especially after a NASA rocket blasted off from the Northern Territory in June.

Old war ships and new rocket ships are all part of the massive international arms buildup for U.S. and its vassals, oops allies, to fight China and its strategic partner Russia. 

What does that look like where you live? 

Where I live we'll gather Saturday July 29 at 9:30am to protest the so-called "christening" of a nuclear-capable Aegis Destroyer war ship at General Dynamics Bath Iron Works shipyard.

Menacing China with nuclear weapons systems that can be ported in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, or Australia (and maybe New Zealand?) is the point. Peek below the surface rhetoric and you'll see that's what the war in Ukraine is about -- weakening Russia in advance of hot war with economic rival China.

I talked about much of this on a talk radio show here in Maine this morning (hear the recorded interview here). One of the hosts challenged my belief that building nuclear weapons systems and spreading them all over the world makes people in Maine less safe, not more safe.

What do you think?

No Cluster Bombs To Ukraine: Protesters Gather In Maine's Capitol City

Thirty people and dogs gathered in the state of Maine's capitol city yesterday for our tenth in a series of statewide coalition protests against funding the war in Ukraine. 

As has become the norm for these protests, thousands of passing motorists saw our messages and reacted with thumbs up, honks, and waves. We stand at Maine's busiest intersections to reach as many eyeballs as possible. Next month we'll stand in Ellsworth (Aug 19), gateway to posh coastal enclaves like Bar Harbor. And in September we'll be in Unity (Sep 23) to greet the traffic jam occasioned by the hugely popular Common Ground Fair.

A couple of loud men shouted at us about their love for cluster bombs, but many of us held signs objecting to this particular weapon because 1) they mostly kill civilians and children, often for years afterwards and 2) the U.S. public has had a particularly negative reaction to sending Ukraine cluster bombs. 

And, a few motorists waiting for the light to change asked, What's a cluster bomb? So we're always out there educating in the absence of media who long since chose propaganda over helping people know what's really going on.

As has also become the norm at these monthly coalition protests, new folks joined us for the first time. The newcomers trend young, which this grandmother finds encouraging. 

Another great feature is seeing old friends who we've stood for peace with in the past. Nancy Blaisdell Baxter said in our closing circle that she was there remembering her late mother, Florence (a high school classmate of my father's), who I stood with in Skowhegan against the Iraq war 20 years ago.

One of the best aspects of our protest series is gathering for lunch afterwards. This is where we find new people to connect with or catch up with old friends. Yesterday's topics of conversation ranged from co-sponsor Party for Socialism & Liberation members crashing the governor's opioid summit to call for effective action on the overdose crisis in our state; local environmental movements; the ongoing housing catastrophe; and the politics of inclusion via the prompt, "What book have you read lately that changed or challenged your thinking?" (Good one, MB.)

Our email list keeps growing. Thanks to the volunteers who help build it! See you next month.

Or maybe the proxy war on Russia will be over by then?

Corruption In Ukraine & The U.S. Mutually Rewarding

Alleged to be Ukrainian Minister of Defense Resnikov's newest ride, this Mercedes Benz SLR MacLaren 999 has gilded tires, a diamond-inlaid cabin, and costs $11 million.

I don't often write about corruption. It's not that interesting to me as it seems quite predictable. The powerful will feather their own nests in any system that allows it, and most systems do -- having been built with this purpose in mind.

So, there are a lifetime's worth of posts about wealth flowing to corrupt leaders from ordinary people who are struggling to get by.

The Obamas' "palatial" home on Martha's Vineyard is an example of U.S. political corruption. The former president has been rewarded lavishly for presiding over banks getting bailed out while we, the people, got sold out.

Even in countries where virtue rather than venality is on display it's easy to find allegations of corruption emanating from the political opposition. It's sort of like war crimes. All militaries commit them while accusing the other side of committing them, and it doesn't seem like a good use of my time to sift through third-hand evidence for the truth.

But I've got to say that Ukraine's leaders are so over the top that it's becoming impossible to ignore. Add in the fact that they have been enriched by U.S. taxpayers more or less directly despite crumbling infrastructure, catastrophic homelessness, apartheid healthcare, and a host of other problems that the U.S. could address with adequate funding.

From RT (whose editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, just survived a second assassination attempt):

On July 7, US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl spoke about a new package of aid from the US which includes cluster munitions – which are banned in 120 countries. The cost was $800 million.

This is the 42nd delivery of aid that Ukraine has received from the US in the past year and a half.[emphasis mine] Since the beginning of Russia’s offensive, the US Congress has approved military and economic assistance to Ukraine amounting to over $70 billion – and that’s only counting direct expenses..

"Ukraine needs only one thing... To have someone come to power who won’t steal. Someone who won’t do it himself and won’t allow others to do so. Unfortunately, so far we haven’t been lucky,” [Aleksey Arestovich, former advisor to President Zelensky] said.  

Ok, so Arestovich has a motive for trashing the government that used to include him. How about Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. investigative journalist Seymour Hersh? Hersh does not approve of Russia's entry into the war but he nonetheless published a piece on rampant corruption in Ukraine, "Trading with the Enemy," back in April.

Zelensky has been buying fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the Afghan war.

And we're all familiar with the tale of Hunter Biden's six figure salary as a director of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where he played no role other than sitting next to "the big guy." President Biden was also alleged in chats recovered from Hunter's infamous laptop to have received 10% of deals made by his son.

https://twitter.com/Resist_05/status/1681096634854436865

Then there is President Zelensky, elected on pledges to end corruption and, incidentally, the war on the Donbas. 

Homes outside Ukraine owned by Zelensky and/or his wife Olenka. Screenshot from Scott Ritter's video "Agent Zelensky - Part 1"

Screenshot from Scott Ritter's video "Agent Zelensky - Part 1"

Pre-2022, i.e. when corporate media headlines about Ukraine did a 180, even The Guardian found he was part of the problem and not likely to be part of the solution.

Neither is the U.S. government likely to be part of the solution. The Pentagon failed its fifth consecutive audit last year, appearing to lose track of 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets.

From the Washington Examiner:

“DOD’s inability to adequately track assets risks our military readiness and represents a flagrant disregard for taxpayer funds, even as it receives nearly a trillion dollars annually," Republican lawmakers wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Liberals will be annoyed with me for quoting a conservative, GOP-aligned media source. Because everything -- war, graft, and other corruption -- must be viewed through the lens of false dichotomy. 

If a Republican wins the White House next year, as seems increasingly likely, Democrats will suddenly care (again) about financial malfeasance at the Pentagon and enriching the oligarchs of Ukraine. Time for those guys to purchase a few more offshore villas before the jig is up.

NATO Summit Turns Its Back On Zelensky And Pivots To China

As the collective West turned its back on a bad actor, Russia turned its back on a grain deal that was supposed to feed the Global South.

Many have commented on -- and photoshopped -- what is by now an iconic photo from last week's NATO summit in Vilnius. For example:

This rendition plays on the fact that Ukrainian President Zelensky's image seems to demand he dress in pseudo Army fatigues at all times, even formal dinners in a European capitol. So, he looks more like the janitor than a power broker. The yellow bucket plays nicely next to Mrs. Zelensky's blue dress to invoke the ubiquitous flag adopted by liberals in support of the Democratic Party's signature proxy war. (Said flags are looking rather tattered and faded these days as Ukraine's spring-no-wait-more-like-summer offensive sputters out with little accomplished.)

President Zelensky was possibly the only person in Vilnius who expected Ukraine to be invited to join NATO. Instead he was rebuffed but told that his real soldiers can keep fighting and dying while the West dials back its financial support and supplies of military equipment. 

Consolation prize: cluster bombs for Ukraine! These are on the shelf in the U.S. arsenal, mostly because when used they are extremely destructive of both children and public approval.

(Note that Politico's National Security Daily is brought to you by one of the big dogs of the U.S. military industrial complex, the true winners of the proxy war on Russia via Ukraine.)

President Zelensky lashed out at being snubbed and a UK government official admonished him to show more gratitude for what he's already received. (President Zelensky has reportedly become immensely wealthy skimming off foreign aid and can easily afford a business suit to wear to these sort of gatherings. His public relations staff no doubt advised against it.)

What was most significant about the NATO summit lay to the east. This surprised no one who has recognized that weakening Russia is merely the prelude to taking on the West's major competitor, China. Why? "The deepening strategic partnership between the PRC and Russia and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests."

Since when is Japan in NATO? Or Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea for that matter? ODD ANDERSEN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

From NATO's Vilnius Summit Communique:

The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values. We remain open to constructive engagement with the PRC, including to build reciprocal transparency, with a view to safeguarding the Alliance’s security interests.

As reported by Shannon Tiezzi in The Diplomat,

NATO leaders called out China for “malicious hybrid and cyber operations and its confrontational rhetoric and disinformation” and accused Beijing of striving “to subvert the rules-based international order, including in the space, cyber and maritime domains.” The statement also expressed concern over China’s attempts to “ to control key technological and industrial sectors, critical infrastructure, and strategic materials and supply chains” and “create strategic dependencies.” 

Note: the U.S. has relied heavily in recent years on its made-up concept "rules-based international order" which translates to "f**k international law and the UN, the powerful do as they will and the weak submit as they must."

China was not slow to respond. The Chinese mission to the EU had its spokesperson issue a statement that included the following:

the Communiqué arbitrarily distorts China’s stance and policies, and deliberately smears China. We firmly oppose and reject this accusation..

The trend of the world is surging forward. We urge NATO to go with the trend of the times, listen to the just call of the international community for peace, development and cooperation, correct its misperceptions and policies, and play a constructive role in world peace and stability. 

We would like to make it clear to NATO that the Chinese side is firm in its resolve to safeguard its sovereignty, security and development interests. We firmly oppose NATO’s eastward movement into the Asia-Pacific region and any action that jeopardizes China’s legitimate rights and interests will be met with a resolute response.

Meanwhile, Russia announced it was withdrawing from the cooperative agreement to allow grain shipping through the Black Sea. Intended as a way to mute the effects of the Ukraine war on food supplies in the Global South, instead the deal resulted in Ukraine re-selling the grain to Europe. Russia had warned several times that if the other part of the deal, that of lifting restrictions on their export of food and fertilizer, they would let the agreement expire.

The West can now claim that Russia has abandoned the humanitarian goals of the grain shipping deal. And the heavily propagandized public in NATO nations will eat this analysis up, much like they still cling to the absurd notion that Russia's entry into Ukraine's civil war in February 2022 was "unprovoked."

Some are suggesting that the straw that broke the grain deal's back was the use of a civilian ship carrying grain to launch drones that blew up the Kerch Strait bridge, injuring a teenager and killing her parents. But actually the cancellation announcement preceded the attack. (Ukraine recently took belated credit for the October 2022 attack on the bridge that links Russia and Crimea, an attack that used a suicide truck bomber rather than underwater drones.)

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova pointed out that NATO players are likely involved, too. 

Decisions are made by Ukrainian officials and the military with the direct participation of American and British intelligence agencies and politicians. The U.S. and Britain are in charge of a terrorist state structure.

Meanwhile you may be wondering, who will be the proxy assigned to fight China on behalf of NATO? Taiwan, Japan, and Australia are all in the running. Maybe Hong Kong and New Zealand too? Stay tuned. 

Movie Review: ISRAELISM

A long-awaited documentary on the generational shift in perceptions of Israel by U.S. Jews came to the Maine International Film Festival last night. Seven years in the making, ISRAELISM combines searingly honest interviews with archival material to tell the story of the profound absence of the Palestinian point of view in the training of young Zionists. (Full disclosure: I donated to an early fundraising round for the film, and director Eric Axelman is a childhood friend of one of my kids.)

As he conducts a tour through the occupied West Bank, Baha Hilo of To Be There tells the camera crew, "Jewish Americans would tell me things like, We like you but we don't like Palestinians. Even though I'm the only Palestinian they know."

Animations for recalled incidents reminded me of the Israeli film WALTZ WITH BASHIR depicting tormented recollections of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres by a traumatized IDF soldier who participated. Forty years on, this week's IDF and settler attacks on the Jenin refugee camp will produce the same result: trauma for the Palestinian survivors and for their oppressors. The turning point for young idealists in the IDF who find themselves on the wrong end of a gun is a major theme in both films. And although no one in ISRAELISM uses the term "moral injury" it's clear that it affects even non-soldiers who witness the brutality of occupation firsthand -- in one case, by exiting a Birthright tour funded by older Jews who have made it their life's work to train kids to be Zionist.

Jewish identity in my lifetime has often focused on issues of justice and equality. When these traditional ethics of Judaism confront apartheid, land and water theft, and violent suppression, it creates friction. Holocaust trauma does not, for many young Jews, justify brutality against the indigenous people of Palestine.

Anchored by the recollections of two young Jews, the film centers Simone Zimmerman and Eitan. We hear Eitan recount why he enlisted in the IDF and how his experiences tormenting Palestinians while "just following orders" turned him against the occupation. We see Zimmerman give details of the indoctrination she experienced in her Jewish day school and summer camps, producing a 10% IDF enlistment rate among her U.S. high school graduating class. 

We also see Zimmerman, co-founder of the organization If Not Now, touring the West Bank with Sami Awad of Holy Land Trust. And headlines about how she was hired as Jewish outreach advisor to Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign and fired only days later for a past social media post critical of Israeli PM Netanyahu.

It's not the only brush with U.S. presidential politics in the film. Coincidentally, current Green Party candidate Dr. Cornel West appears giving a talk on his views on the spiritual dimensions of Israeli apartheid. (Not incidentally, the pro-Israel views of Democratic primary challengers Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Marianne Williamson have eroded support for both among leftist opinion leaders in the U.S.)

The film succeeds in part because it maintains a sharp focus. It could have widened to include many related topics: why so many politicians and other power brokers in the U.S. are beholden to AIPAC and Israel (cf. Epstein's black book). The complicity of the corporate media in pushing pro-Israel narratives. The intifadas and ongoing Palestinian resistance could have been covered in more detail. And the film could have addressed the constitutional crisis of the alleged "only democracy in the Middle East" enforcing segregation and ethnic cleansing.

It could have delved into the role of settlers, many of whom are from the U.S., as the opportunistic Zionists who serve as colonizers. One of the most poignant clips in the film is one I'd seen elsewhere: a Palestinian woman confronts a settler saying, "You are stealing my house!" He responds in a U.S. native speaker accent, "And if I don't steal it, someone else is gonna steal it." So much for his Jewish ethics.

To my mind Zimmerman gets the last word:

What we've been told is the only way that Jews can be safe is if Palestinians are not safe. 

The more I learned about that, the more I came to see that as a lie. 

French Uprising Your Government Doesn't Want You to See

https://twitter.com/Mushtaq07559495/status/1675402909251510274

This week of rebellion against police brutality in France has the nation reeling and, as of last night, has spread to Switzerland and Belgium -- but here's what the U.S. corporate news feed that came installed on my laptop wants me to think is going on:

But if you can get any real news you know that cities all over France are in flames as protests over the police killing of an unarmed teenage driver spread.

Videos of the encounter show police threatening to shoot 17 year old Nahel S. and then following through. Did they expect the outpouring of rage from France's permanent underclass of economic migrants, their children, and grandchildren? How much do police worry that French exploitation and vicious repression of its colonies in Algeria will blowback on the domestic scene?

This image from France flips the script on iconic video of police kneeling on George Floyd's neck long enough to suffocate him, an act which led to a summer of uprisings in Black communities all over the U.S. in 2020.

Here's the manifesto that two big police unions issued, where they throw down against..the French state?

If you don't read French, here's a translation offered by Arnaud Bertrand:

Now that's enough... Facing these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, it must be imposed! Restoring the republican order and putting the apprehended beyond the capacity to harm should be the only political signals to give. In the face of such exactions, the police family must stand together. Our colleagues, like the majority of citizens, can no longer bear the tyranny of these violent minorities. The time is not for union action, but for combat against these "pests". Surrendering, capitulating, and pleasing them by laying down arms are not the solutions in light of the gravity of the situation. All means must be put in place to restore the rule of law as quickly as possible. Once restored, we already know that we will relive this mess that we have been enduring for decades. For these reasons, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA Police will take their responsibilities and warn the government from now on that at the end, we will be in action and without concrete measures for the legal protection of the Police, an appropriate penal response, significant means provided, the police will judge the extent of the consideration given. Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the government will have to become aware of it.

Meanwhile, vigilantes joining the side of the police are being welcomed.

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1675334092672598018

Some of the reports -- such as vandalism of a Holocaust memorial and the release of zoo animals -- suggest to me that instigators are also part of the mix.

This isn't the first uprising against French colonial violence, nor is it likely to be the last. The colonized are rising up in Palestine against Israel, too. Younger generations living under the constant threat of violence appear to feel their time has come. 

Meanwhile, head of state President Macron attended an Elton John concert. 

You can't make this stuff up.