After having gathered, the demonstrators’ march starts, but they are immediately charged. Three hours of madness ensue, when an iron-clad police tries to disperse the demonstrators with one tear gas canister and stun grenade after another. Some people try to defend themselves in order to keep the armed men at bay from the march with their own bodies, some object flies on the shields of the agents but the outcome is heavy, counting now 317 total detainees among demonstrators, bystanders and youngsters with an incongruous appearance.

This is what happened, despite what the French media (which are being echoed back on this side of the Alps) tell, showing us too well that war-time propaganda does not allow dangerous deviances from the official version.

In an authoritative way, after two weeks past the attacks, what stands behind the pompous rhetoric of the “democracy under attack” (that the rulers of the world stuff themselves with), is shown to us: in order to defend the “freedom of the West”, there is no better thing than hitting with truncheons whoever infringes the demonstration ban during wartime.

“The west is under attack because they fear our freedom”, as Ezio Mauro (the director of the Italian daily Repubblica) put in the headlines some days after the attacks.
Who can disagree with him?
When one is afraid of a society whose only guaranteed freedom is that of consumption – with the act of drinking a beer at the bar being elevated to an act of resistance against the terrorists – while the police arbitrarily arrests hundreds of people, throwing tear gas at the crowd? Your freedom is the functioning economy and the truncheons on the heads of the dissenters. Today our national media keep being at their worst. “An outrage to the victims” the newspapers cry, being them more scandalized by the destiny of the candles at the Place de la République memorial site than of the creak of their cherished democratic freedoms under the martial law. “Paris held hostage the thugs” say TV news all around, without being able to realize the obscenity of such hyperboles at all – in a city where a few days ago some armed men really held hostage and killed hundreds of people.

Libération, the newspaper that best represents the course of a certain post-’68 left, the morning after the attacks had “Bataclan Generation” as its headline. A lucky expression, which was immediately echoed in the presidential speech by Hollande, because the sugarcoated role that politics wants to relegate to who is now aged between 20 and 35 is actually that one. That of the victims. And of the consumers. When the Bataclan generation comes out from the bistrot terrace, the democratic truncheons defending Western values are unleashed.

Vive la république!

DTG for Infoaut