Slanders depicting “Yellow Vest” protesters as violent neo-fascists collapse

 

Slanders depicting “Yellow Vest” protesters as violent neo-fascists collapse

By
our reporter

28 November 2018

In the aftermath of last Saturday’s demonstrations in Paris, the French political establishment has unleashed a torrent of political invective against the “Yellow Vest” protesters on the Champs-Elysées. Ministers, police and the media have vied with each other to denounce workers, professionals and small business people who protested in yellow vests as “ultra-left” or neo-Nazis. Their propaganda is totally false.

“It is not yellow vests who demonstrated, but the brown pest [far-right],” Minister of Accounts Gerald Darmanin declared, echoing the Interior Minister Christophe Castaner. The latter called the protesters “seditious” and said they “responded to the call by [National Rally President] Marine Le Pen,” the neo-fascist leader who neither protested on the Champs-Elysées nor appealed for violence.

The police prefect defended his forces’ brutality by citing the threat of “violent ultra-right and ultra-left networks.” Marianne denounced a “united ultra-right and ultra-left, these fake ‘yellow vests’ who ransacked the Champs Elysees,” while BFM-TV’s Ruth Elkrief worried over the “influence of a number of parties … of the extreme-right and extreme-left” on the protests.

The reactionary petty-bourgeois pseudo-left reprised the same insults as Darmanin in order to present the “Yellow Vest” protesters as virulent neo-fascists. Mediapart, which is close to the middle-class New Anticapitalist Party, attacked them for having organized “very right-wing demonstrations” or even being “a little brown.”

On Saturday, the police carried out mass arrests of what they declared to be the most dangerous among the…

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