French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday, February 14, urged calm and restraint after the fatal beating of a 23-year-old French youth aligned with the far-right on the sidelines of a conference by a hard-left lawmaker in the southeastern city of Lyon.
The death of the young man – identified only as Quentin – has intensified tensions between France’s far-right and radical left who are both eyeing 2027 presidential elections.
He had been hospitalized in Lyon on Thursday after being attacked while providing what his supporters said was security for a protest against an appearance by hard-left MEP Rima Hassan at the Lyon branch of the Sciences Po university.
I think the world needs less radical left and more militant left.
We’ve tried talking for the last 80 years or so. Its not working so well. So maybe we need to bring back the violence that defeated fascism last time.
I agree. We do have to be quite careful about the optics thing, though. It’s not enough to be on the side of the people, the people also have to feel like you’re on your side.
The right has that part down real good, and we’re getting wrecked in many places because of that fact alone.
If you’re going to adopt violence, you have to target the exact right people or you just plunge yourself into a long, dumb spiral of public outrage until whatever the organization originally meant to accomplish is lost in the news cycle of violence. People won’t remember what you represented, only what you did. And you can’t fix that with messaging, it’s just not how it works.
I can name a dozen different iconic seditious or rebellious groups in recent history and for every name read, you will see in your mind’s eye terrorism and bombings and violence, not what that group wanted to accomplish or what their goals were.
I get gnashing teeth reminding people of this fact, but Mussolini was not defeated by a plucky band of rebels who dragged him out of his bunker, he was arrested by his own king and government and handed over the opposition. We still need political action or we’re just embracing mindless chaos, we will need politics to both secure an actual victory and we will need politics to deal with the millions of people who didn’t vote for any of your actions but will still live next to us after.
The man who died was a far right militant, member of a group who regularly descends in the street to beat everyone not looking like their idea of a French.
I don’t think killing people is a solution. But if you think violence is sometimes justified against some people, this dude was as close as it gets.
“The means are the end,” to quote a line from The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin (anarchist and legendary fiction writer). While I agree that we need most parts if the left for revolution (Andor does a decent job demonstrating this), I’m highly skeptical that lasting change can be built on revolution that is primarily enacted through violence.
How many incidents does it take before it reaches “primarily”? Because this is one incident.
We need less polarisation. The far left and far right are both wrong because the world is a complex place full of nuance.
Personally I consider myself left of centre, but I also find policies that are absolutely core to the left abhorrent. That means I have voted centre right in the past, or centre depending on the situation.
What is absolutely certain is this kid did not deserve to die and the people that did it should JUSTLY face the full force of the law.
Extreme centrism is also a thing. And it is as bad as the other, and reading your comment you could find yourself in this group.
“Even if your sainted grandmother is a republican, they are evil and will burn in hell for all eternity.”
And it’s true