Riot Coverage, And Lack Thereof

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Jeeeeeeezz…. from a couple of weeks of non-stop translating and posting about the riots in France, to a couple of weeks of hardly a post… not very impressive!

This is what happened: all of a sudden, there was hardly anything that i could find worth translating. No offense to those whose texts i saw, but i was interested in statements from actual organizations, or else “news on the ground,” or else worthwhile analysis… and when the rioting stopped, so did the material.


Which surprised me, and was (is) not a good sign. I mean, it makes sense that more people set things on fire and fight the cops when there are riots going on, because these acts take on added meaning when lots of other people are doing it – plus, it’s safer!

But that does not hold for anti-repression work, political analysis, news of the clampdown or ideas of how to resist it. One might rather expect these forms of activism to become more prominent as the actual fighting subsides.

Of course, this may have been the case – the internet is a very unreliable mirror, held up not to reality but rather to the fingertips of people who click on keyboards. The trendy much-vaunted “blogosphere” (dontcha love how capitalism creates new virtual reality catchphrases to keep us amused?) may be slightly more trustworthy than your lying daily newspaper – but is that really saying much?

So perhaps people have been doing the right thing at the right time, completely possible… it’s just i don’t know about it.

Which is why i’m happy to say that i just received an email from a new French blog - http://atouteslesvictimes.samizdat.net/ - specifically devoted to documenting the repression and attempts to resist/counter it. It made my day!

Now i won’t be up to translating anything tonight, but i promise (barring the unforeseen!) that tomorrow i’ll give it a whiz, and hopefully we’ll all find out what the hell has been going on!
Categories: clichy-sous-bois, france, riot, other-blogs