Belangrijk om te weten.
Zoals de poging om de Front National op deze wijze
tot een prominent onderdeel te maken van de Franse politiek.
Behind the atmosphere of hysteria stoked up by the French political establishment and media is an attempt to impose a definite and reactionary political agenda. In a country that has seen two world wars and numerous revolutionary struggles, the killing of 12 people is being elevated to the level of an unprecedented national tragedy in a bid to revive the flagging fortunes of Hollande, France’s most unpopular president since World War II.
By appealing for national unity behind the police and security forces, Hollande is seeking to bolster the credibility of a government despised for its austerity policies, legitimize French participation in the reactionary, Washington-led “war on terror” in Africa and the Middle East, and facilitate right-wing political combinations in a desperate attempt to stabilize the state.
As Hollande’s invitation of National Front (FN) leader Marine Le Pen to the Elysée Presidential Palace on Friday made clear, what is being considered is the further integration of the neo-fascist FN into mainstream French bourgeois politics. This underscores the authoritarian and anti-democratic evolution of European politics and the necessity for the unification of the European working class across ethnic and religious lines in a revolutionary struggle for socialism.
As masses of people do begin to reflect on the political issues bound up with the Charlie Hebdo shootings, it will occur to them that the French government itself bears political responsibility. The two Islamist gunmen who carried out the terrorist attack, Said and Cherif Kouachi, are themselves a particularly toxic product of the failure of capitalism to offer any hope to broad layers of the working masses.
Muslim youth suffer from extreme levels of unemployment, as high as 40 percent in some of France’s suburbs, where the Kouachi brothers found low-paid odd jobs on the margins of economic life. They face a stream of Islamophobic measures, such as bans on the burqa and Muslim headscarves. These tensions are intensified by French imperialism’s abandonment of its previous opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, aligning itself instead with US-led wars from Afghanistan to Libya and Syria and, once again, Iraq.
It is these conditions that lead the most disoriented and backward elements to snap and carry out horrific crimes such as the Charlie Hebdo shooting.
France
Belangrijk om te weten.
Zoals de poging om de Front National op deze wijze
tot een prominent onderdeel te maken van de Franse politiek.
Behind the atmosphere of hysteria stoked up by the French political establishment and media is an attempt to impose a definite and reactionary political agenda. In a country that has seen two world wars and numerous revolutionary struggles, the killing of 12 people is being elevated to the level of an unprecedented national tragedy in a bid to revive the flagging fortunes of Hollande, France’s most unpopular president since World War II.
By appealing for national unity behind the police and security forces, Hollande is seeking to bolster the credibility of a government despised for its austerity policies, legitimize French participation in the reactionary, Washington-led “war on terror” in Africa and the Middle East, and facilitate right-wing political combinations in a desperate attempt to stabilize the state.
As Hollande’s invitation of National Front (FN) leader Marine Le Pen to the Elysée Presidential Palace on Friday made clear, what is being considered is the further integration of the neo-fascist FN into mainstream French bourgeois politics. This underscores the authoritarian and anti-democratic evolution of European politics and the necessity for the unification of the European working class across ethnic and religious lines in a revolutionary struggle for socialism.
As masses of people do begin to reflect on the political issues bound up with the Charlie Hebdo shootings, it will occur to them that the French government itself bears political responsibility. The two Islamist gunmen who carried out the terrorist attack, Said and Cherif Kouachi, are themselves a particularly toxic product of the failure of capitalism to offer any hope to broad layers of the working masses.
Muslim youth suffer from extreme levels of unemployment, as high as 40 percent in some of France’s suburbs, where the Kouachi brothers found low-paid odd jobs on the margins of economic life. They face a stream of Islamophobic measures, such as bans on the burqa and Muslim headscarves. These tensions are intensified by French imperialism’s abandonment of its previous opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, aligning itself instead with US-led wars from Afghanistan to Libya and Syria and, once again, Iraq.
It is these conditions that lead the most disoriented and backward elements to snap and carry out horrific crimes such as the Charlie Hebdo shooting.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/12/fran-j12.html