Aspects of the crisis in France

For more ideas and facts about France on this site up until August 2019, click on  this

March 31st 2020

This page may be subject to various changes as information and ideas develop. Every day brings information that often contradicts the previous day’s information. Given this, some people, fearing being wrong,  prefer to resort to generalities that often remain at a banal level. I prefer to give tentative facts and ideas that could help towards overcoming the confusion than avoiding the confusion by hardly saying very much that’s useful

Other reflections on global aspects of this crisis will be put up later

“Do you want to know if you have Corona? Spit on a bourgeois and wait for the results. Solidarity with working women!”

April 11, 2020, around midday, two cops without a warrant, forced their way into the squatted flat in Marseille (pictured above), invoking the state of health emergency, saying  that the banner incites people to spit on each other. Threatened a bit later with at least 10 cops outside (who’d arrived as back-up) breaking into their squat, the inhabitants  felt it advisable to remove the banner (here, including brief video).

See also: Contestavirus, a chronology of recent expressions of opposition to what’s going down throughout the world

And also see this, which has been on this site since the end of January: Coronavirus – an exercise in intensified social control

Making sense of and trying to subvert this new epoch means wading through the nonsense and the blind-spots,  means making sense of both our own anxiety and that of others, unraveling both our own limited understanding and that of others. We have to unravel what is genuine and what is manipulation in this situation – what is genuine fear and what is fake fear in this scary  dystopia, in this – the unreal realised. To get a grip on a situation outside of our grip we have to firstly understand and question our own responses, and those of our friends, family  and contacts to this unprecedented attack on rationality and class consciousness. The incessant production and consumption of confused information about this virus, whether it comes from politicians, scientists, “experts” or even friends overwhelms us with a mass of contradictory notions and facts that reinforce our sense of powerlessness. Gross grotesque exaggeration, speculation and rumour rule. In this state-inflicted state of confusion, most feel that submission to  the state is the only way to survive this viral monster. The state knows best, and, like mummy and daddy, is there to protect you from yourself and others.  And those who want to remain like  kids are being reduced to a gullibility, dependency and impotence that’s largely without precedent…But worse, they’re beginning to increasingly and aggressively resent anybody who’s not utterly gullible, dependent and self–destructively submissive to the state’s manipulation of  fear, both certainly genuine and certainly not.

“Hotel of the future”

The crisis in France

The cops, and the state more generally, have been as insanely meticulous in their application of the new restrictions, in the imposition of unprecedented madness, as in most of the countries that have imposed lockdown.  Nationally, unless for a “good reason”, you’re not allowed to go further than a kilometre from the house and then only for an hour: you have to put the time of leaving on a declaration sheet to be filled out every day (judging by the extraordinarily empty streets, many many people seem not to even have grabbed this one hour of air and exercise, possibly believing that the air is crammed full of the invisible virus).  Officially, you’re not allowed to be in pairs and curfew is applied  in lots of different parts of the country (though not in many villages or small towns ) in various forms, with differing hours depending on the town or city. Marine le Pen wants curfew everywhere, though it seems that some of the more obviously excessive restrictions may well be  lifted in certain regions.

Of course, in practice, many of the restrictions are applied fairly haphazardly, but it only needs some particularly miserable application of the law to be given publicity and it scares people off: who can afford risking a minimum 200 euro fine (it used to be 135 euros)? Locally, bylaws issued by the mayor can make things even worse.

In Sanary, a fairly small  pretty coastal town on the Côte D’Azur, the  mayor (been mayor for 31 years!) has issued a decree  to prohibit the inhabitants from moving further than 10 meters from their homes, as part of the confinement measures. The only authorized outings will be for shopping –   and even that is to be restricted. Only one baguette per person.  No jogging, no walking the dog,   no going out to buy a newspaper or for any other single item. This, apparently, is to be enforced by just 12 (unless it was a typo on the report I saw) local cops – for a population of over 16,500. The rich who overlook the sea with magnificent views won’t be bothered, even in the unlikely event of being policed. They’ll have their servants do the shopping, and if they go for a stroll they can always say they’re off to do the shopping themselves.

SOME ANECDOTES

The following  happened this afternoon (31st March), an example of how everything seems to be cracking up:

I was just on my way out with my timed and signed declaration sheet, when the phone rang and it was my ex-, the mother of our daughter. She’s been ill for some time and so is potentially very vulnerable to the virus but she’s far more scared-cum-furious at the the state and media’s reaction to it than of the virus itself. On the phone she told me that her aunt who lives up the road from her  had rung earlier and said that a neighbour of hers was repairing a common muddy access road held in common with neighbours and another neighbour came up to this neighbour and told him he should have asked all the neighbours concerned whether he could do these repairs. They had a row and the neighbour who complained went back to his house, took out a gun , went back and shot him dead. Then, after this call from her aunt, my ex- heard some neighbours of hers (dealers) screaming, putting up the music very loud, and then smashing things and she looked out and they’d set fire to some stuff,  and this went on for an hour  and then a bit later she went to the gate of her driveway and found that they’d partly broken it by throwing a large dustbin at it, and all the rubbish was strewn all over the place. None of the cars belonging to non-dealers around the dealers’ house was attacked, but  she thought they picked on her place because she’s a woman living alone. This was unprecedented, even for these dealers.

“Neighbours
Everybody needs good neighbours
Just a friendly wave each morning
Helps to make a better day
Neighbours,
Need to get to know each other
Next door is only a footstep away
…Everybody needs good neighbours
With a little understanding
You can find the perfect blend
Neighbours,
Should be there for one another
That’s when good neighbours become good friends”

I suggested she calm down a bit, then went out myself for a walk in the countryside just outside my village.  10 minutes later as I began to cross a bridge 2 cop cars drove up, one cop jumped out of his car and shouted furiously at some teenagers  who were just going for a walk about 50 metres away in the woodland and out of reach of the cop cars. He shouted at them   to stop,  because there were 3 of them together, even though  families were walking in 2s and 3s. But these were teenagers, and fair game for fascist filth. Another cop in another car,  a friend of my fascist neighbour, jumped out and said “We can trap them by going round to the other side” – clearly excited at the prospect of a hunt, the excitement of the chase in his eyes.  As I walked away I made, to someone passing by, one of those hand signs round my head indicating that I thought the cops were insane, and then  the cop car with the cop-friend of my fascist neighbour, a cop who knows me because of various hassles,  started to back a bit towards me. I thought they’d seen me and so I walked a bit faster off the road into the heathland. At that point I saw 2 other cops also policing the countryside.  6 cops controlling social distancing out in the countryside! Yes, I know madder things happen everywhere, but this was me experiencing it directly, after an agitated phone call  and over a very short period of time. A bit later I met these 14-year-old teenagers; they were frightened and so I told them where the cops had gone; they’d managed to avoid them – “They’re mad!” they said to me as they ran off in the other direction. These series of events over a 20 minute or so period  of time inevitably can get to you.

How mad is it that the slightest  daily life interaction   is now surrounded by such a stifling  suffocation of simple sense and of senses  that going for a walk or getting slightly close to  someone can be considered either dangerous or subversive? Something as threatened by external authority as, say,  nicking something from a supermarket, something which you have to calculate,  feel out, take a risk with,  constantly watching. And we’re all forced to adapt to this madness and somehow even find something positive in it, like people do with war stories – turn  misery into an interesting anecdote. But the positive is only in negating pseudo-positivity, in finding communication in anger and critique and searching for a way out. Because, as Macron said a little bit too  often to not feel the menace beneath it  – “We are at war”,“We are at war”, “We are at war”,“We are at war”,“We are at war”, “We are at war”. And we’ve certainly been  bombarded with  bullshit coming  from their notion of “we”, from their war against us – it’s not quite as devastating as death by virus or by the Luftwaffe but almost.  To accept that this can go on is to accept a world reduced to madness. It  cannot go on. But saying this is obviously no more than saying this: good will has to be turned to practice.  How we find  ways to attack all this shit is as vital for our health as other forms of resistance. Resistance to the virus is inseparable from resistance to social distancing, resistance to death is inseparable from  resistance to an external authority that has never been so invasively anti-life. The body cannot be separated from mind or social life.

In Toulouse a Deliveroo worker delivering stuff on a bike was badly beaten up by the filth. As if the misery of zero-hour contracts wasn’t bad enough. The cops have subsequently had to back off – letting people in the popular areas gather largely without hassle for the moment. And this is happening in other banlieux.

FACING THE CORONAVIRUS:

HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF AND OTHERS

Fire helps to eradicate the virus. You can help by burning  schools, banks  and police stations.

Policemen and controllers are more likely to be virus carriers. You can help  by forcing them to stay at home, for example by wounding them.

To avoid starvation and the aggravation of the advance of this illness during this emergency, loot the supermarkets and distribute food for free to those who need it.

Wear gloves and masks PERMANENTLY. This prevents the police from identifying you in this war against this virus-society

**

In Sete, near where I live, a guy I know was out walking when he bumped into a neighbour of his and as they stood chatting, a cop car came up and harassed them for daring to be out together (maximum of 1 person allowed in most parts – though maybe they’ll reduce it to half a person or less, maybe an arm and a leg, or just ears no mouth…).  Another guy I know in Sete went out without his papers, the cops put him up against the wall, hands held high, and frisked him all over. When he turned round, they shouted “Keep your distance!”, as if they hadn’t been touching him with their bare hands just a moment before.

But on the “lighter” side – on the 1st day of the “emergency” they closed down the homeless shelter in Sete and there were lots of homeless people on the pavement outside it. A cop came up and told them to go home. They said they had no homes to go to.  So he said “Why don’t you open a squat?”.  He didn’t provide them with a crowbar though.

In Aisnes the mayor’s closed down all sales of alcohol.

Nationally, the cops are threatening to go on strike because they’re not permitted to have masks or gloves, a strike I’d fully support as long as the government refuses to give in to their demands. Curfew in cities near where I live (Sete, Montpellier and Beziers)  is now 9pm to 5 am. A small town not far from me (Roquemaure), with just 5500 inhabitants, also has a similar curfew. As we all know, the virus is particularly dangerous at night and, under cover of darkness, goes around with crowbars breaking into houses with the particularly insidious aim of infecting babies.

So it goes…

“Health” is the war of the State

Re. Chloroquine, the anti-malaria drug: an atmosphere of scandal surrounds the government over this. Lots of people are angry. About 3 weeks ago a Spanish Chloroquine-producing factory offered 3 million Chloroquine pills to the French state, but this was refused. They were then sold to another country. A French Chloroquine-producing factory is ready to get the go-ahead from the state to produce and distribute them, but even today has not yet got the order, despite the fact that the Health Ministry has reluctantly agreed to its production. The Ministry of Health has known about Chloroquine’s efficacity in China since at least February 10th  if not before (other drugs – anti-HIV or anti-Ebola drugs have also been found to be effective, as have injections of an antibody serum). The mayor of Nice was infected with the virus, as was another high-up in Marseilles (it’s generally available to the elite). Both were cured with Chloroquine, but only in Marseille at a hospital where the now famous Dr. Raoult is the main advocate of this treatment, is it available to ‘ordinary’ people. Which is not to oversimplify the class nature of all this: some high-ups have/had the virus. The official reason for this mad situation is that there haven’t been enough tests on it and that it has side effects. Strangely, this drug has been in use worldwide since shortly after the war. In France, every time someone goes to Africa, Asia or South America, they have to take this drug – and that’s been for the last 60 years. Suddenly now they’re worried about it not having been tested properly!!! Besides, all medicine can have side effects. And certainly lots of drugs are  dangerous when mixed with other drugs, but that goes for so many drugs. People die from antibiotics sometimes (in the US, the pharmaceutical industry is the 3rd cause of death). Certainly it may well not be the miracle cure-all that Dr.Raoult claims it is, but then what drug is? Dr.Raoult – pretty high-up in the French medical establishment hierarchy and totally respected by them for over 20 years until about 6 weeks ago – is now being conveniently subjected to ad hominem attacks: apparently he’s a climate change sceptic, for instance. And he rose in the hierarchy due to his connections with  Sarkozy. Mon Dieu! – a reactionary doctor! Who would have thought it? But just as reactionary lawyers are often more helpful in practical courtroom situations than lefty or “anarchist” ones, the fact that he’s a reactionary doesn’t automatically negate his abilities in this particular field. Raoult may well be exaggerating the value of Chloroquine, but given that quite a few have been very quickly cured of the virus, people should ask themselves why the state is dragging its feet over this as death counts rise (though available on prescription for diseases like malaria or lupus, it’s not permitted for Coronavirus). Probably because of competing specialisms and interests. For instance, take  Yves Levy, former head of the very powerful organisation INSERM (National Institute of Health and Medical Research) and still works for INSERM. He’s the husband of the former Minister of Health, the haematologist Buzyn (she resigned as minister in February; she had previously been, for 6 years, a member of the committee on nuclear energy of The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) is intimately involved in the pharmaceutical industry and some have said that he’s involved in trying to develop a vaccine that would inevitably be a great deal more expensive than Chloroquine, a very cheap drug to produce. One possible alternative to Chlorquine mentioned on the TV apparently costs almost 100 times the cost of  Chloroquine. I constantly say “apparently”, and use other tentative qualifications throughout my comments on this crisis, because appearances envelope the whole of this horror show in a very dense fog through which it’s hard to make out anything but shadows of the truth.

Mainstream article on this which I’ve just (6/4/20) seen

Though much of this sounds like conspiracy theory, it’s very clear that the pharmaceutical industry in France is extremely powerful. The Agence Nationale de Sécurité du Médicament et des Produits de Santé – ANSM “The National Agency for Safety of Medicines and Health Products”) – is responsible for assessing the benefits and risks associated with the use of “health” products throughout France. In its former incarnation (from 1999 to 2012 this organization was called AFSSAPS, but changed its name after it became associated with various scandals involving placing very dangerous drugs on the market, sometime after the blatant lack of independence of its members became apparent: out of 675 people in the hierarchy of this organization, at least 410 had interests in the pharmaceutical, cosmetic or other “health”-related industries.

In the swine flu “epidemic” of 2009, the French pharmaceutical industry stood to make something over a billion euros out of a vaccine that was eventually only taken up by 10% of the population, despite a constant propaganda campaign on the part of the media and of the state relentlessly trying to frighten people of the danger, and despite the state forcing doctors to prioritise the adminstering of these vaccines. As a result of this failure to manipulate the  majority of the population (how things have changed!), the pharmaceutical industry in fact made a pittance – a bit less than 400 million euros, the Minister of Health having initially ordered 94 million vaccine doses, a great deal  of which were eventually returned unused. Just 310 people died in France. Just 310, plus about 20 who died from the vaccines and a few others who were permanently damaged by them. Can’t find the figures for mortality rates from ordinary flu of the year 2009, but the winter of 2014-15 caused over 11,000 deaths in France  from  flu (Hong Kong flu in the winter of 1969-70 killed over 30,000 in France in just 2 or 3 weeks!). A few years ago Raoult denounced the Minister of Health at the time of the swine flu pseudo-epidemic, Rosalyn Bachelot, for having insisted that people needed a double dose of the vaccine when just one dose would have been enough.

A helluva lot of people  focus on discussing whether Raoult is truly coherent, whether he follows scientific methods and principles and whether Chloroquine is effective or not, thus completely losing themselves in abstraction.   China has shown that Chloroquine is truly effective, even if its efficacy is probably not as absolute as Raoult has claimed it is; it  has  cured lots of  people in Marseille, and it’s being prescribed by GPs in other places, even though it’s difficult to find. Bollocks to so-called “objective scientific method“!  This focus on the abstraction of “objectivity” comes over as like someone trying to decide whether the combinations of various ingredients for a cake will be appreciated by people  before he’s even started baking and tasting it. As the old phrase goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.  And with Chloroquine, the proof is in the curing, even if there’s no miracle.

What’s fundamental is that the team of advisers surrounding Macron are basically ideologists with little to no practical involvement in dealing with illnesses let alone pandemics. Raoult calls these scientists bureaucrats, though that’s not exactly accurate – they seem to be mostly “theoreticians”.  Meanwhile, the media shows its contempt for the people queuing up outside Raoult’s hospital – the one hospital so far that’s giving out Chloroquine. These very patient patients (the queues are extremely long) have been contemptuously dismissed by media pundits as being capricious and simply vaguely curious. This, even though all of them have been tested by their GP and sent to the hospital which is the centre of Raoult’s treatment. So much for media “objectivity”!

The enormous confusion about the situation is something not at all confined to this drug. So many vague ideas and estimates floating around, with very little precision.  How long does the virus remain on surfaces, how airborne is it, how effective are masks, how long does the virus take to  incubate, how can one seriously judge the fatality rate given the fact that many cases are not reported, or that many people are not tested, etc. etc. etc –  questions that  still – after  over 4  months since the first case in Wuhan – have not been clearly answered. This failure is partly a result of a competitive mentality between different experts and the lack of genuine knowledge that such careerist mentalities encourage. Every expert feels compelled by the need to fight their own corner, their need to protect their expertise in this society, and their desire for the large amounts of money this society pays for “expertise”, and their consequent inability to honestly question themselves, to test out any doubts independent of their financial interests and an inability to see anything outside of their particular focus on their specialised area, their absolute absence of will and ability to even begin to attempt to look at the totality rather than just a small fragment. All specialists/experts, in their arrogant displays of knowing what’s best, tend to excessively valorise their specialism/expertise, which is something we have to invariably bear in mind, which we have to invariably remain skeptical of, though without totally dismissing aspects of what they say. That goes for Raoult as well, who sometimes presents himself as mankind’s gift from God (or rather, Science), the Great Saviour! But let’s give the guy his due: he’s cured people, and these “objective” scientists have done fuck all other than endlessly spiel blah blah blah.

Meanwhile, there are no or very few masks – even for hospital workers who have to buy them themselves, if they can get them, from D-I-Y shops. And there’s no or very little testing. Several years ago some “experts” in France decided that pandemics  were almost certainly a thing of the past. Other experts decided that the manufacture of masks in France was not important because, after all, given the unlikely chance of them becoming  necessary they could be ordered from factories  producing them by the 100s of millions… in China!

***

People are wondering what’s going on behind the scenes of this endless  empty discourse and empty streets. Some imagine the state is preparing a whole new set of repressive laws. Others say they’ll use the “health” of increased restrictions on the use of cash to impose a bankers card/cheque-book only regime that  makes the black economy  a lot easier to police. Whilst pension payments have been delayed even further, some, only half-jokingly, are saying they’re  killing off the old so that they don’t need to impose the proposed pension  reforms, which have been temporarily withdrawn (a somewhat mechanistic manner of seeing  how the state functions). Others imagine they’ll be a massive construction of facial recognition cameras that can recognise faces through masks (certainly a recent technological development:  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-facial-recognition/even-mask-wearers-can-be-idd-china-facial-recognition-firm-says-idUSKBN20W0WL ).  Others think, with the moratorium on  debt-repayment including mortgages in certain parts of the world, that  this is the potential collapse of the current banking system. Still others think that they’ll use the massive reduction in pollution to justify the development of eco-fascism involving the banning of private cars for most of the poor.  Others think about the disastrous  effect on the tourist industry – air b’n’b’, cheap airflights etc.   Others anticipate how xenophobia will pan out, how the various economic alliances may collapse, how this or that may well develop to a degree of weirdness that ideas borrowed from the past are incapable of comprehending.  All the complexities of this  speculation need to be unravelled and  analysed to not just make intellectual sense of and be discussed but  as part of the  struggle to do something about.

One thing is sure –  people will have got used to, accepted  and  justified a degree of alienation, isolation and confusion, and of fear, resentment  and outright  hostility towards those who dare refuse to submit to such a pseudo-life, that  will probably make it a great deal harder to overcome than anything previously.  A totalitarianism very different from classic Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism  or Fascism – a totalitarianism not just of the streets, workplaces and media but also a totalitarianism of the mind, body and soul. But the probable is resignation and utterly self- destructive. It’s in the possible  that genuine health  lies.  The possible is the search for life, the expression of anger and  revolt.

In Llandudno, Wales, goats have been coming down from the Great Orme to graze in the locked down town

or:

?

Added: 2/4/20 –

Translated sections from this (a response to an abjectly apologistic article on the Tiquunist/Invisible Committee/Appeliste site “Lundi Matin”), which praises the purely “positive” aspects of this crisis in terms of how we should welcome the coronavirus as the Messiah coming to get us out of our voluntary bondage and our daily apathy so that we can “all” get on with the pleasures of gardening and the joys of greeting strangers etc.,  an “all” which excludes so many millions of proletarians, whether those in prison, the homeless, those forced to work (cashiers, building workers, deliverers,  preparers of orders for online sales, and  especially those working in greatly under-equipped hospitals), etc.:

“The immediate consequences of the pandemic are the unprecedented deployment of counter-insurgency technologies, and more broadly techno-fascism, which we’ve seen has been happening for quite a while. Of course, we do not deny the danger of the virus, but this should not mask the violence of the authoritarian response that is being unleashed today and what is being  announced. If China has been a model envied by Western techno-capitalists for a while, the pandemic is an opportunity to imitate it at high speed under the guise of a state of health emergency. In China, drones come to take your temperature on the street and it is no longer possible to go out without a smartphone, because you have to be geo-locatable and have proof of your health on your smartphone. Germany and the United States are working with StartUp on solutions of this type. In France, as in Madrid, drones are out to increase the capacities of police control.

Macron and E. Philippe [France’s PM] have warned: there will be a before and after the coronavirus …. Bruno Lemaire and the president of Medef [organisation representing major bosses]  talk about setting up a minimum economic service to prevent workers from exercising their right of withdrawal [ie the right to withdraw their labour in circumstances that are dangerous to health and safety], Edouard Philippe warns that it will be necessary to make great efforts after the crisis to revive the economy, all this by passing the “state of health emergency”, a component of which includes 300 billion euros donated to companies, increased power given to employers who can extend the working time of their employees, force or cancel paid holidays, etc. Edouard Philippe understood this well, the current state of emergency is an opportunity to “profoundly change our habits”. The post-coronavirus is the standardization of new surveillance technologies in the name of our “health” –  tele-medicine [ie being ‘examined’ by your doctor through the internet], school and university on digital platforms, generalized tele-work, and therefore even more isolated workers in their work. All this while the workforce that makes all the infrastructure necessary for these isolation and control technologies remain slaving away in  the cold or in a  heat wave, or during pandemics! “Profoundly changing our habits” also means getting used to police checkpoints in the cities and countryside, drones in the street carrying out all kinds of checks, etc.

After the health crisis will come the economic crisis, it will be even harder than that of 2008. The financial markets, the multinationals and the States (which will still go into debt to “save the economy”) are losing a lot of money, and once the first wave of the pandemic has passed, they will want to charge us. They are going to impose new austerity measures under the guise of national unity, in order to resuscitate the margins of capital’s surplus value  and to replenish the coffers of the state.

…for the state and capital, the pandemic is also the opportunity to make a brutal transition to a much more authoritarian regime. The real problem is not the apathy provoked by mass society…the problem is the mass exploitation carried out with  an iron fist by capitalists, the state and its police. Shouldn’t we remember the figures for  the repression of the Yellow Vest movement?…

No one can say what will happen in the coming months, but we will have to be attentive and not remain in the grip of fear and the permanent state of emergency in which the rulers will try to keep us so as to pass their safeguard measures, then boost the economy. With this “crisis”, given that we need to repeat this again, it is we, the exploited condemned to work and misery, that the capitalists will sacrifice again and again on the altar of power and profit. The pandemic affects the whole world. Authoritarian measures to safeguard and then revive the economy will also affect the whole world since our economies are interconnected to an unprecedented degree. We must not allow ourselves to be brought down but to revolt against these measures, the glaring injustice of which will be seen as big as the nose on our face. There may be hope for an international social revolution. We need to understand what we are caught up in in order to free up our margin of manœuvre in the times to come.”

See also the same site’s Pandemic, Authority & Freedom.

**

Explanation of some of  the attacks on workers’ rights:

• 60-hour  working week for some workers
• Reduction of paid holidays
• Imposition of compensation days for unpaid overtime
• Amazing gifts to corporations

Marine Le Pen and the rest of her party voted in favour of these, avoiding playing her usual populist card, presumably because her and her party no longer think it’s necessary to try to recuperate anger.

Some events

(For events after 4/4/20, see comments boxes below)

4/4/20:

France, Yvelines: despite government pretense at softly softly approach to banlieux during this crisis, cops and youths clash, with 5-year-old girl victim of cop flashball being gravely wounded, following arrest of teenager for supposedly stolen motorbike  Report in English

See also this (not directly related to this crisis, but – given the increasing violence of cops generally during this insanity – this film about the cops in France is worth a look).

2/4/20:

France, Tourcoing: health workers revolt – unofficial “wild” demonstration against crazy situation in hospital – lack of masks etc

Many hospitals, globally, in treating this epidemic as priority, are being avoided by  cancer patients, and many other dangerously ill people. Also, abortions in France have almost totally stopped. Imagine the amount of unwanted kids that will be born, how they’ll suffer the misery of mothers and/or fathers who never wanted them.  Worse,  loads of old people in Residential Institutions for Dependent Elderly People will be, in effect, killed off in isolation  in this Social Darwinist-inspired “let those surplus to the requirements of surplus value” die development towards involuntary euthanasia.

1/4/20:

France, French Guyana (South American department of France): prison revolt

Prisoners stole the keys to the cells, then set fire to a corridor. No-one is hurt. The state has decided to disarm the watchtowers and all the screws have withdrawn, but outside gendarmes are moving in.

France, Yvelines: cops fire flashballs after controlling people for non-respect of quarantines rules

26/3/20:

France, Seine-St-Denis: anti-confinement clashes with cops Video here