Tag Archives: May Day

Coronavirus diary day 47 – Covid-19 boosts economy … with the truth

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At home, prepare the revolution, Poster by Atélier Youpi

The French government has opened an anti-fake news page on its website. Meanwhile, the health minister has assured us that more tests would not have reduced the number of Covid-19 cases, the official map of infection levels has had to be revised, and leaked documents show there will not be enough masks until June.

“The Coronavirus crisis encourages the spread of #fakenews,” the government’s indefatigable spokesperson Sibeth Ndiaye declared in a tweet on Thursday.

So the government’s website now has a page linking to “viable and verifiable sources”. At least the sites are not run by the government. They are the fact-checkers of established media, such as Le Monde and Libération.

But these ingrates have not all been delighted by the official endorsement, which itself could lead the disaffected to see them as firmly ensconced in the establishment.

On top of which, some well-known media outlets, for example right-wing Le Figaro, left-wing Médiapart and the regional press, don’t figure on the good-guys list.

With immaculate timing, Health Minister Olivier Véran on the same day told LCI television, “A test doesn’t cure, it doesn’t change the treatment or the diagnosis … If we had tested absolutely everybody we would have more or less the same number of people ill.”

In South Korea, which is next door to China and has almost as big a population as France, there have been 10,780 confirmed Covid-19 cases, compared to France’s 130,185, (both figures are undoubtedly underestimates even if Véran implied in the same interview that the French statistics were accurate). South Korea’s death toll is 250, compared to France’s 24,594.

South Korea’s success in fighting the virus is universally attributed to a strict policy of testing, tracing and treating.

After publishing a map with three départements with practically no Covid-19 cases marked as heavily infected, the national health authority has been forced to issue a new one, having admitted that the original statistics were based on irrelevant information.

And Le Monde reveals that interior ministry internal documents point out that the masks that we are all supposed to wear in public once lockdown is lifted are unevenly distributed across the country, leading to the risk “that some French people will have too many and others won’t be able to find any”.

Not to worry though, the number of masks has “considerably risen in the last few weeks” and the situation should be sorted out by June, when we initially hoped all this would be over.

Let’s take a look back at our lockdown May Day.

Here’s a piper playing the Internationale on a Paris street.

The words to the Internationale were written by Eugène Pottier, who was elected to the Paris Commune and wrote them while in hiding from the repression that crushed it.

He fled to the USA and returned to France when an amnesty was declared in 1880.

The music was composed by Pierre de Geyter, a Belgian who lived in the northern French town of Lille, until he was obliged to leave because the bosses blacklisted him as a dangerous revolutionary.

And here and at the top of this post are some graphics for couch-stranded rebels, produced by the Atélier Youpi, which in normal times operates out of Saint Denis, the working-class town on the northern outskirts of Paris.

Stay/Resist at home Altélier Youpi

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 24,594, up 218 in the last 24 hours. 25,887 people are in hospital, down 396, with 3,878 in intensive care, down 141. 50,212 people have been discharged from hospital, 736 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 46 – A May Day minus manifs and muguet

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Facebook sent me one of those reminders of what I was doing this time last year this morning – photos of teargas, black blockers, Yellow Vests and trade unionists on last year’s May Day demonstration. (You can see the pictures and read my account of the day here.)

There’ll be none of that this year. Although this loyal union activist set off for the manif. “It’s habit!” she declares.

Given that they can’t march, the unions, who as usual can’t agree on joint demands and action, are trying to “occupy the visible space”, ie post things online.

The most left-wing ones, the CGT, Solidaires and the teachers’ union FSU, have for the first time joined forces with ecology campaigners, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, to call for more resources for public services, repatriation of capital that has fled abroad and better conditions for those workers who have proved themselves vital during the crisis.

Supporters of the party that used to be called the Front National can watch video of their leaders placing a wreath on the Paris statue of Joan of Arc and slog their way through an hour-long speech by Marine Le Pen.

Muguet, Photo Kajebi II (Wikimedia Commons)

Also absent from the streets will be sellers of muguet (lily of the valley). The French give each other bunches of the flowers in the spring. The charming tradition apparently goes back to the Middle Ages and there are different legends as to which king, queen or other aristocrat started it.

The association with May Day itself has its downside. Before World War II left-wingers apparently used to wear dog roses on International Workers’ Day. The collaborationist Pétain government felt obliged to rebrand the communistic festival, renaming it Labour Day and encouraging people to wear the “national” muguet. The poor old dog rose never made a comeback.

Gaul is divided into three parts, almost. The government’s Covid-19 map has three categories, red (bad), orange (could do better) and green (soon-to-be-liberated). It will be revised before 11 May but it gives a good idea of which areas will be kept in some sort of lockdown.

The classification is based on three criteria: The estimated level of infection in a département, how overstretched hospitals are, and the capacity to carry out tests (there are actually two different maps, one for each of the first two criteria).

The north-east of the country, including the Paris region, is red, as are three other départements, one of them overseas. The south-east and much of the centre is orange. And most of the west and the Channel coast is green.

But no sooner had the map been published than some regional leaders claimed their fiefdoms should not be classed red at all. There have been hardly any cases in the north of Corsica, the south-western département of the Lot and the Cher in the centre.

In the Lot there are only 15 people in hospital at the moment, down from 27 a week ago, and only one in intensive care, down from nine.

Health officials say the confusion is due to errors in the way the statistics on admissions to emergency departments have been compiled.

They have a week to get their shit together, since the map drawn up on 7 May will decide which areas can go for full on déconfinement and which will remain under a form of lockdown, although what that means in details still seems unclear to me.

Are we dropping our guard? There seemed to be more traffic on the streets when I last made a trip to the shops, to days ago. My former colleague Jessica Phelan has also noticed this in Italy.

A new poll shows a slight drop in observation of anti-virus precautions in France, although the use of masks has risen.

We don’t want a second wave, people!

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 24,376, 289 in the past 24 hours. 26,283 people are in hospital, down 551 in the last day, with 4,019 in intensive care, down 188. 49,476 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,248 yesterday.

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Macron minister in French farce after false May Day demo claim

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France’s minister for machismo, Christophe Castaner, has covered himself in ridicule by falsely claiming that a group of demonstrators attacked a hospital during this week’s May Day demonstration in Paris.

Police stop demonstrators by the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital

Castaner, a former Socialist who lobbied hard to become interior minister in the Macron government after another Socialist defector, Gérard Collomb, ducked out, has seized on any pretext to try to discredit protests against the government, whether they be the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), the trade unions or the left.

On May Day they all marched together and Castaner’s twitter finger was clearly itching. Before the day was out he had announced that a group of demonstrators had “attacked” the famous Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, assaulted a member of the hospital staff and forced entry into the resuscitation unit.

Unfortunately for Monsieur le Ministre, hospital staff denied his version of events and video shot at the scene showed demonstrators fleeing teargas and stun grenades fired by the police. They had blocked a section of the demonstration from advancing towards the Place d’Italie, as their colleagues came to grips with demonstrators further up the road (see my account of those events here).

Thirty-four demonstrators were arrested and detained for nearly 30 hours but then released without charge.

On Sunday they presented a joint statement to the media, complaining of Castaner’s attempts to exploit their case for political purposes and thanking the hospital staff who came forward to give an accurate account of what had gone on.

Castaner is one of a long line of Socialist defectors who seem to believe they must prove some sort of political manhood by declaring their undying love for the police and all their works.

The now utterly unloved Manuel Valls, who was interior minister before becoming prime minister and is currently a soon-to-be unsuccessful mayoral candidate in Barcelona, suffered from the same syndrome.

By coincidence, today I read an account of German Social Democrat Gustav Noske’s suppression of the 1919 “Spartakist uprising” in Berlin.

“Someone must play the bloodhound I will not shirk my duty,” he declared as he led the Freikorps into the city to massacre over 1,000 rebels and assassinate Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Formally dissolved in 1921, the Freikorps were the soil from which the Nazi militias and the Waffen-SS grew.

The Nazis later booted Noske out of his minister’s position and he retired from politics after Hitler became German chancellor. He was arrested by the Nazis in 1937 but released after a few months, only to be detained again in 1944 after the attempt on Hitler’s life.

He was interned in Fürstenberg/Havel concentration camp, then in Ravensbrück, before being transferred to Berlin’s Lehrter Strasse priso, from which he was liberated by Soviet troops in May 1945.

Be careful what demons you unleash!

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