There’s always plenty of time later to agree to disagree.
Debates and disputes over tactics tend to steal the whole conversation when we’re strategically lost. I feel more comfortable pushing through police lines to block a coal mine or disrupt a meeting of executives from the fossil fuel industry.īut my preferences don’t matter at all here, for several reasons.įirst, alliances are not built upon tactical discussions. If someone would mention these as potential tactics for a protest I would organize, I would vehemently counter-argue or simply not take part in such a protest.
Burning public libraries, crashing a car into a mayor’s house and trying to set it on fire, looting shops, and destroying buses and tramways doesn’t belong to the action repertoire I follow. It begs the question: Are these not actually two sides of the same coin, two moments in one larger uprising?Īs an activist trained in nonviolent direct action, I’m obviously partly unsettled by the eruptive protests following Nahel’s murder. The near simultaneous occurrence of these two uprisings is more than a coincidence. The sign reads “the mountains are rising up.” (Facebook/Les soulèvements de la terre) Soulèvements de la terre protesting a mega-tunnel in the Maurienne valley on June 17. Now, anyone claiming to be a member of the movement is committing a criminal offense. A couple of weeks ago, the government decided to outlaw the group. Since then, several spokespersons and coordinators of Soulèvements de la terre have been arrested and interrogated by the counter-terrorism service. At one recent action against a giant water-reservoir designed to support industrial farming, two protesters ended up in comas - the result of explosions from police grenades banned in most European countries, but not France. This movement, created in 2021, is fighting against large and useless infrastructure (like highways and giant tunnels under the Alps), transnational corporations and other sources of pollution and environmental destruction. Recently, I helped organize support and solidarity for another uprising in France: Soulèvements de la terre, or Earth’s uprising. Young people are taking to the streets to protest against police violence and state racism. Since then, anger has erupted almost everywhere in the country, especially in poor neighborhoods. On June 27, Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French boy of North African descent was murdered by a white police officer in a Parisian suburb.
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