Anyone arguing that the protests in France aren't legitimate because they were "infiltrated by rioters" does not understand the most fundamental elements of the history of French democracy.

Simply put, going back well beyond 1968, civil unrest *is* political praxis.

Of course, these bad actors seeking to discredit the protests because of "migrants" aren't interested in having a real conversation about revolutionary impetus or even basic civil rights, so much as they are parroting anti-immigrant dog-whistles.

The real question is, why has the discourse surrounding protests in France been infiltrated by reactionary rhetoric? Who benefits from this divide-and-conquer rhetoric?

The attempt to delegitimize protest through the language of disorder is itself a political intervention: one that shifts public attention away from the conditions producing unrest and toward the [racist] perceived illegitimacy of those expressing it.

Insofar as fascism isn't some kind of psychological anomaly, but rather is a logical response that emerges from within liberal democratic institutions under capitalism in order to protect private property and the state from radical responses to working class immiseration arising from internal contradictions of capitalism; fear-mongering about "islamo-leftism" is to the 21st century as fear-mongering about "judeo-bolshevism" is to the 20th.

In Nazi Germany, "Judeo-Bolshevism" fused antisemitism with anti-communism, portraying Jews as an alien force supposedly orchestrating revolutionary subversion. (Don't ask them how it is that Jews who control the banks are actually communist traitors). In contemporary French reactionary discourse, "islamo-gauchisme" depicts left-wing anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and solidarity with Muslim communities as evidence of an illegitimate alliance undermining French national identity, and indeed Western CivilizationTM itself.

In both cases, the nation is defined as belonging to those who don't challenge its existing distribution of power. If you fight to preserve that hierarchy, you are a hero. If you struggle against it, you are a traitor, or you were never part of the community in the first place.

But here's the key difference. By highlighting the link between radical critique of political economy, and the struggle for Palestinian liberation, reactionaries - who, on social media, in the context of dead internet theory, function as de facto bots for amplifying fascist rhetoric - are so close to getting it.

Where they get lost is in identifying as temporarily embarrassed billionaires whose interests are in alignment with that of the state as an organ of capital. By conflating conflict over material power with conflict over legitimate belonging to the "nation", the political and economic conditions that produce civil unrest in the first place become eclipsed by arguments about who is respectable enough, human enough, "French" enough, for their belonging to be perceived as legitimate enough for their participation in politics to matter. And through this conflation, we can see that this rhetoric is explicitly reactionary and racist in that it seeks to preserve puritan racial ideas of what a nationality actually is.

Palestinian liberation is a threat to global capitalism, and that's why platforms like Meta, X, reddit, etc, curate algorithms that not only tolerate but promote the overt racism and islamophobia at the heart of "it's not a protest, it's a riot" discourse.

"They can't be French because they are black". Ferme ta crisse de gueule, you racist piece of shit. The adults are having a conversation, and you need to go back to kindergarten to learn basic socialization. Sharing is caring people. Maybe then you can begin to unlearn the imperialist propaganda that celebrates the "achievements" of colonization while dehumanizing the colonized diaspora.

But I digress. You've got to give it to reactionaries: they correctly perceive that there is an inherent connection between anti-imperialist resistance and the struggle against unequal distribution of material power. But by confusing their own material interests with a need to defend those structures of power, they admit their own internalization of a dehumanizing worldview by treating respectability as a test of political humanity.

It's a scary world out there. While providing the necessities for our well being, nature can be harsh and indifferent. In the absence of being raised in a culture that is spiritually grounded in values of reciprocity and care, many seek to fill the void left by that absence by clinging to brittle identity structures where exclusion is perceived as necessary for safety. When civil unrest arises as a natural response to institutionalized exclusion, the irony is that delegitimization of that dissent through reactionary rhetoric itself functions as a type of mob mentality.

Preservation of existing social orders built on exploitation is fundamentally at odds with the preservation of your own well being, and the only thing preventing you from seeing that is your own attachment to ideas that colonized your mind by conditioning you to believe that survival requires conformity to hierarchies of domination.

If survival is felt - coerced into being felt - as a competition for status, then another person's liberation can appear to threaten your own security. Equality looks like dispossession, and solidarity feels like betrayal. Conformity becomes a survival strategy, even when the hierarchy demanding conformity is itself responsible for producing insecurity and harm.

If capitalism is perceived as genuinely meritocratic, then civil unrest as a response to collective suffering can only be seen as anger about personal failures, or straight up barbarism.

If colonization is viewed as a righteous endeavor - bringing civilization to the savages - then immigrants who seek material stability in the imperial core will always be seen as personally responsible for the political insecurity that motivates migration in the first place.

However, if capitalism and colonization are correctly understood as inherently violent, dehumanizing systems, reproduced through exploitation and coercion, then civil unrest can be understood as an expression of the same revolutionary impetus among the masses that in France contributed to the overthrow of monarchy and feudalism, and the declaration of universal human rights to liberty and equality, in the first place.

The defense of exclusion and hierarchies of domination, then, become a way of managing one's own insecurity. People who experience their place in society as precarious may cling to national or racial hierarchies because those hierarchies promise a sense of belonging that material conditions cannot reliably provide. That promise is fragile precisely because it depends on maintaining a distinction between those presumed to deserve security and those presumed to threaten it, even as the status quo actively undermines well being and increasingly defers the cost of doing business upon the most vulnerable - in particular, future generations.

That's why treating protestors as migrant rioters who are a threat to national security is ultimately about protecting the fragile identities built on the unsteady foundation of internalized dispossession.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

CANADIAN SOVEREIGN CELL ACTIVATE

ALL FRONTS MOBILIZE

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

REPEAT

CANADIAN SOVEREIGN CELL ACTIVATE

ALL FRONTS MOBILIZE

TUKE REBELLION COMPROMISED

ALL AGENTS ACTIVE

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

We don't have to believe we're being watched for the possibility of being watched to change our relationship with the world. Sometimes, nothing changes except our awareness of ourselves. We're laughing, talking, walking somewhere familiar. Then we become conscious of how we might appear to someone else. Nothing around us has changed, but something in the experience has. We're no longer entirely within the moment. We're also looking at ourselves from the outside.

We have always imagined how others see us. We learn to anticipate reactions, adjust our behavior, and understand ourselves through the people around us. But now, our actions can be recorded, preserved, and encountered by people who were never there. A moment can outlive its context. A version of ourselves can remain long after we've changed. The observer becomes less a person than a possibility. We don't have to believe anyone is watching. We understand that what happens can be documented, separated from the moment, and interpreted by someone whose perspective we cannot control. We can be seen without being understood.

But the strangeness goes beyond recording. We can turn the outside perspective on ourselves even when nobody else is present. We examine our reactions, question our motives, and wonder what our behavior says about us. We become both the person living the experience and the person observing it. Some of this is necessary. Self-awareness allows us to recognize our mistakes, understand our motives, and change. Without it, we would struggle to learn from experience. But there is a difference between reflecting on an experience and monitoring ourselves while we're living it.

Reflection can deepen our understanding of what we're experiencing. It can also turn our attention toward how we appear, what we're doing, and what the moment might say about us. The distinction isn't always clear. The same awareness that helps us understand ourselves can introduce distance between us and what we're living. I wonder what happens when we're accustomed to doing both at once, when we experience something while also considering how it looks, how it might be remembered, or what it reveals about the person we are. The experience becomes something we're living and something we're evaluating.

Perhaps something is lost in that distance. Not the experience itself, but the ability to let it happen without immediately turning it into a story about ourselves. There are moments when we forget to observe ourselves. We become absorbed in a conversation, laugh without considering how we look, or find ourselves somewhere beautiful without thinking about what the experience says about us. For a while, we're simply there. We can reflect on these moments afterward, try to understand why they mattered, and carry their meaning with us. But their value doesn't depend on our ability to explain them while they're happening.

Perhaps this is what interests me about the unobserved self. Not a hidden version of ourselves that nobody can see, but the possibility of experiencing life without continually turning ourselves into objects of our own attention. And yet, how would we recognize such a state without observing it? The moment we begin examining our experience, we introduce the very distance we're trying to understand. We can't simply abandon reflection. It's one of the ways we make sense of our lives. But understanding an experience and being present within it are not the same thing.

Can we understand ourselves without making ourselves into objects to be understood? I keep returning to this question because I don't know how to answer it without stepping outside the experience again. We look at ourselves to understand who we are, but neither perspective, from within or from without, seems capable of telling us everything. Perhaps we need both, though I don't know how they fit together.

The unobserved self may not be a self that nobody can see, or one that never looks inward. It may be the part of our experience that doesn't have to become an object of examination in order to matter. I don't know if we can fully escape the impulse to observe ourselves. Nor do I know whether recognizing the moments when we stop observing ourselves preserves them or changes them. Perhaps some experiences can only be understood afterward. Perhaps some lose something when we try to understand them too soon.

There is something that looms above me

And I am only nothing when it appears

And it’s that something that makes me the container

For a moment, I just am; a gas, a floating head

Until I’m transformed into that which I lack

A vessel in need of a pilot

A sentence in need of the words

I had no lungs before oxygen

And no teeth before food

I was less than nothing, I was

And just as soon as I am, I am not

When that something arrives and makes me its cage

I am the prisoner that imprisons

The container that is contained.