October 17

A few brief reflections on events last weekend in France, Italy, Belgium, Albania (so far).

I was immediately reminded of events I experienced very up close and personally in Santiago and Valparaiso in 2019.

This ultimately ephemeral 'social outburst' had also sprouted from the germ of a student financial/affordability beef, very quickly metastasising into a more all encompassing on-the-streets revolt.

By the time I arrived on the scene there was a clear dotted line between the people who were protesting real world social grievances and those whose minds were lost in strange fantasies, the latter having largely hijacked the moment, and it was not hard to spot those who came along for the simple pleasures of wreckage and pillage.

It was also not hard to spot, in Valparaiso in particular, the vulnerable individuals who were being made to suffer, both by the rioting and by the response to it from the authorities.

There were also plenty of pale-skinned, educated, middle-class Chileans marching (and generally screaming) behind Mapuche banners, a variety of somewhat delusional cultural/grievance appropriation which we can see around France right now and which never ends well.

Anyone wanting a more informed and detailed account of how these movements tend to take shape and then pan out could do little better than read Christopher Clark's Revolutionary Spring, a masterful history of '1848' across continental Europe.

Chile's estallido was very much an illuminating archetype of the form, as its end state would be the switch to a far right government with a rather nasty anti-immigration bent.

Anti-Peruvian sentiment in particular was bubbling away beneath the surface in Santiago back in 2019, even if there was nothing of the sectarian-inspired malice we have seen across France. (Though idiots were there aplenty, willing themselves to be useful.) 

In Marseille it has been reported that there was a very specific targeting of Jewish-owned businesses yesterday.

I am going to be watching Paul Greengrass's take on the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 later this week and one aspect of the story I am NOT expecting The Uprising to tackle faithfully is how the resurrection, once inside London, quickly turned into a violent xenophobic frenzy, with a marked anti-Flemish component. Jews, having lately been expelled from the country, missed out on this occasion. In Cambridge lawyers were singled out for an ugly 'pogrom'.

The appellation 'The Peasants' Revolt' also strongly suggests that the event encompassed involved a mass mobilisation involving a significant minority or even a majority of 'ordinary people' as then understood, and this was not in fact the case. History books, like the media, distort our perspectives somewhat.