The French Spring
Israel Shamir
This year, spring in France is unusually cold and
rainy, following on the heels of a frosty and long winter. Only the last
Sunday was different: the sun pushed the clouds away for the first time
in months, and immediately the lucid Parisian air warmed up and trees
broke out in full bloom. The French were cheered up after the long,
hibernal gloom and went out to the streets to protest – ostensibly,
against the new gay marriage and adoption bill that the government is
trying to push through Parliament despite popular rejection, but verily
against the neoliberal policies of their new government. The French
police, brutal as ever, wielded batons and tear gas. and arrested the
demonstrators. Sixty-seven of them were in prison after the
mammoth demonstration of March 24. (They were apparently released).
The newspapers speak of the “French Spring”, echoing the Arab one.

The new President. Francois Hollande, is quite
unpopular; his ratings are the lowest of any French president since
presidential popularity began to be rated in 1981. And for one simple
reason: His socialist party continues with the same neoliberal policies,
this time in agreement with tame trade unions. The Wicked Witch of the
West is dead, but her spirit is still with us. The ministers have
offshore accounts they previously denied. By a new 'national agreement'
(ANI),
employers will be allowed to extend working hours, reduce salaries to
the minimum and enforce «working mobility» by sending workers to
far-away plants. If employees refuse to transfer they can be fired
without compensation. Family allowances shrink, pensions stagnate and do
not keep up with the inflation. France, like the rest of us, was robbed
by the bankers, and working people are left to pay the bills. The
families of French workers have difficulty making ends meet. They view
the gay marriage and adoption bill as
a part and parcel of this neoliberal attack on the French family,
and the struggle against the bill has united working France. «Let them
rather speak of gays than of work», was the government logic; but the
trick failed: the protesters carried slogans against economic policies
as well.
All but three gates of the Jardin du Luxembourg on
the Left Bank of the Seine in central Paris are barred; the remaining
open gates are controlled by riot police, since this is the location of
the French Senate. In order to become law, the bill had to be approved
by the Senate and then by the National Assembly, the lower house. The
protesters manned a picket during the debates; featured was Cardinal
Barbarin, the Archbishop of Lyon, the Primate of the Gauls and the
second highest ranking prelate in the Catholic Church in France. Still,
the Senate approved the bill by a wafer-slim majority of two votes, both
given by deserters from the Gaullist party representing the French
overseas. Now the tents of the protesters are pitched in front of the
National Assembly, and the police expect more trouble on April 23, the
day of the final vote brought forth by the government.
The Socialist party and its allies, soft Communists
and Greens, still insist on the unpopular bill. They care more about
their sponsors, the wealthy gays who will be entitled to buy children or
to order them from surrogate mothers at state expense, rather than for
the ordinary French families who can hardly feed their own children, say
opponents. The French Left has a strong anti-clerical tradition: the
pre-war socialists were worse to their church than Stalin . This same
spite inspires them now, too, and causes them to act against working
families. The Church learned the ropes and this time it is supporting
the popular cause, and it is not alone.
The biggest demonstration against the bill on March
24 gathered over a million participants in Paris alone. The French
police
claimed there were «only» three hundred thousand protesters. They
learned from the American repression of the Occupy movement and
falsified the photos of the demo. On the protesters'
site one can see the sloppily Photoshop-doctored photos: in order to
fit their numbers, police erased not only the marchers, but the dividing
lines and trees off the Avenue de la Grande Armée
near the Arc de Triomphe.
The French people are really upset by the bill.
Traditionally extremely tolerant to all sexual proclivities, they
justifiably refuse to see it as a «struggle for gay rights». For them,
this is an attack on family values, a new step towards the Brave New
World of tube-manufactured children, towards inhumane capitalism where
money buys all and ordinary working people are deprived of everything:
of steady work, of respect, of families, of homes and even of their
children.
The supporters of the bill are pushing with their
standard soft-leftist anti-Stalinist agenda of caring for everybody –
gays, lesbians, Jews, immigrants – everybody, that is, except for the
working class majority who are castigated as «bigots, homophobes and
antisemites». Indeed they took a page from
Israel-supporters (who always defend their untenable
positions by crying «antisemitism») and bewailed the «homophobia» of the
protesters. They claimed that a gay was beaten up somewhere, and that
the protesters (sic!) were guilty of incitement, though there is a
considerable and well-publicised body of gays
against the Bill who joined the demo and fought the bill together
with the rest of the French.
The government's new-found mascot is a gross black
woman from the French West Indies, the Minister of Justice, Mme
Christiane Taubira,
the fiery supporter of the bill. But she failed to carry the immigrant
communities with her. «She's gone mad», the immigrants say of her, as
she was known as a steady supporter of family values before she jumped
on the well-greased wagon of gay rights. While the January demo was
mainly a native French affair, the March demo had thousands of Muslims
joining the fray. Even if they were in the minority, these Muslims came
from Rennes, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Montreuil, Saint Denis,
Aubervilliers or Mantes, reported
Le Figaro daily. A young second generation Muslim girl born in
France participated in the demo and said that "she had never felt
herself as much French as now." There were many Muslim organisations who
joined the protest en masse: Children of France, the Union of Islamic
Organizations of France, the Union of Muslim Associations of Seine St
Denis, its counterpart in the Yvelines, Versailles association of
Muslims, Muslim Children, Rennes and Lille associations, and others,
were officially present, says Le Figaro.
The supporters of the bill are guided by their spite
and alien interests, for there are no takers, no beneficiaries for the
new bill. The gays will not rush to use it, for France has for ten years
already had a state-recognised civil union (PACS) suitable for all
genders and covering the same ground as legal marriage. Only 0.6% of all
registered French couples are homosexuals. Even heterosexual couples
enter marriage much less often now than in the past, for divorce is
expensive and difficult. Libertine gays with their fleeting affairs are
quite unlikely to rush for «marriage». The gay-support organisations are
tiny – the most outspoken one, Act-up, has 150 members, a bigger
LGBT – 1300 members.
Same-sex coupling is perfectly accepted in France,
but it is rather an entertainment and a side trick, being taken
seriously much less frequently than in other Western countries. I
explain this by the famous charms of French women – they are smashing,
and no doubt about it! William Dalrymple, the great Scottish
travel-writer, ascribed the ubiquitous homosexuality of Turks to the
quite limited sex-appeal of the moustachioed and squat Turkish women.
The Brits can find their excuse in the figure of Margaret Thatcher, if
the aunts of Wodehouse won't suffice. American ladies were de-genderised
by their feminist revolution and probably would sue you for harassment
rather than respond to your flirt. But can one find a single fault with
the girls of France? Non, non, non…
Still, the new bill will find its beneficiaries:
young immigrant men in search of French citizenship. Until now they had
to look for a willing French woman to enter a fictive marriage for a
consideration of 5,000 to 20,000 Euro. Now they can «marry» a Frenchman,
hopefully for less outlay. Though French gays do not plan to marry each
other, they intend to use the new law and import youthful sex partners
from Tangiers, the homo-capital of North Africa, as their rightful
spouses.
Adoption agencies are glad, too. Each adoption brings
tens of thousands dollars to the agencies, and now they will have new
clients, for the new bill explicitly allows the gay couples to adopt
children. Middle Eastern wars like the Syrian civil war encouraged by
France will provide the desired orphans. Or not necessarily orphans:
there was a famous scandal when the agencies imported children for
adoption from war-savaged Darfur. The children were stolen or bought
from their parents. Some of them allegedly ended up in the organ
transplantation clinics.
The new bill will also give a shot in the arm to the
intermediaries who supply surrogate mothers from the former colonies and
poor Third World countries; the courts enforce the contracts so these
women will have to part with their babies whether they want to or not.
Indeed, the new neoliberal law restores the slave trade to the position
it lost in 19th century. Moreover, bearing in mind the opening for
transplantation, it can launch a kind of neo-cannibalism, too.
The Left accepts all this willingly. French Trots
expressed their support for this practice for «a woman's body belongs to
her only, and she should be free to abort, to engage in prostitution or
to be a surrogate mother». With such an understanding of “freedom”,
there is not much choice between the Trots and Friedmanites. Actually,
there is no choice at all. Both the Left and the Right have betrayed
their voters.
Europe is in bad shape. This year I surfed on the
crest of early spring through many small towns and villages of France,
Italy, Spain; the old continent is dying out. Houses stay empty and
boarded up; only tourists and immigrants remain at large. The big cities
are overcrowded, the rest is dead, as if the dreadful prophecy of Iliya
Ehrenburg (as detailed in his 1920s novel DE Trust) that big
money will destroy Europe, has come true. The good old Europe was
destroyed by a combination of Right and Left policies. Thatcher (and her
counterparts in European countries) eliminated the working class,
industry, education; shifted incomes from ordinary people to the rich.
Afterwards came Blair (and his counterparts elsewhere) who completed the
job by destroying the family and planting his surveillance cameras in
every courtyard. The Right created debts, the Left came to collect and
pay the bankers.
Now in France, the Left is losing the last vestiges
of its old glory by enforcing the neoliberal gay adoption law, for the
question of adoption annoys people even more than gay marriage. It is a
conflict between two rights, the right of gays to marry and the right of
children to live with their real mother and father. By preferring gay
rights to those of children and their parents, the Left is digging its
political grave.
Stalin and Thatcher
The Left set out on its present road with
de-Stalinisation. Let's be clear about this: Joseph Stalin was a rough
and hard man who confronted Hitler, Churchill and Truman; he ruled in
difficult times, and he can't be seen a model for today's politics.
However, he – or rather the Party of Stalin - cared for workers. In his
day, a qualified worker's salary was equal to that of a professor; the
media belonged to the workers' state; workers were entitled to free,
all-included seaside vacations; children had wonderful summer camps and
free education. Unemployment was unheard of. Housing was free, as well
as heating, electricity and telephones. Abortions were forbidden by law.
The family was strengthened. He even re-established the Church after the
Trotsky-led excesses.
Financial geniuses, abortion quacks, gay activists
and Zionist leaders (including my late father) were free to
pinkwash each other in a friendly labour camp in hospitable Siberia.
It is not by accident that the name of Stalin is now making a great
comeback in his Russia as a battle cry against neoliberalism. In the
cities ruined and devastated by the neoliberal reforms, people dream of
putting the guys with big offshore accounts up against the wall,
Stalin-style.
Stalin was as rough with the bourgeoisie as Thatcher
was with the workers. If Forbes, the leading American publication
for the rich, said: “We
desperately
need more
leaders like her”, and the Economist,
the leading publication of the British bankers, dared to say “What the
world needs now is more Thatcherism, not less”, perhaps it is the time
to remember Stalin’s legacy. He nationalised, she privatised, he cared
for family, she destroyed it; she gave all to the rich, he gave all to
the workers.
And to devotees of non-violence I say: without
Stalin, there would be no Gandhi. Or rather, the Mahatma would have been
shot by the colonial masters as were his predecessors in 1856. Without
Stalin, we would have no Swedish socialism, we would have no welfare
state. We would have no decolonisation. If the bosses played fair with
us, it was because they were afraid of Stalin. For the Western workers,
he was like a hard-boiled elder brother: perhaps he hung out with wrong
guys, maybe he belonged to a gang; but because of him, a younger brother
would be safe.
In France (as well as in Italy), the Stalinist
Communist Party was the second largest party in the country, enjoying
massive support. Since de-Stalinisation was forced upon the Party by
Khrushchev, it went downhill to its present weak position.
The Communist movement had to be reformed and
updated, but de-Stalinisation was too drastic a medicine. The Left lost
its beacon and proceeded to swallow every tempting morsel thrown to it
by the Masters of Discourse, and choked on it.
One of these morsels was the gender issue. Lenin
famously stayed clear of it. He was shocked when
Clara Zetkin, the German Communist leader, told him that they
discuss sex and marriage with the female comrades. Stop this nonsense,
he told her. “Is now the time to amuse proletarian women with
discussions on how one loves and is loved, how one marries and is
married? Now all the thoughts of women comrades, of the women of the
working people, must be directed towards the proletarian revolution,
[dealing with] unemployment, falling wages, taxes, and a great deal
more.” I can imagine how he would respond to the present gay-marriage
brouhaha.
Still, some updates to Marxism are needed. First of
all, in its relation to the Church. Now, as the Church is going out to
support the workers’ families, the French Left may reconsider its
attitude to it, and cooperate with the Church as the great French
Communist and a leading intellectual Roger Garaudy has called for:
“Marxism will be poorer if it were to forget St. Paul, St. John the
Baptist or Pascal; and Christianity will be poorer if it turns away from
Marxism”. The enemy is so strong, and his plans are indeed diabolic; we
need to integrate Marxist and Christian humanism in order to save
mankind. A step in this direction has been made by contemporary Russian
communists who successfully interact with the Church; the two work
together to stop the liberal attempts to enforce an anti-family agenda.
The French should follow their example.
Israel Shamir is now in France, and he can be reached
on
adam@israelshamir.net
English language editing by Ken Freeland