EuropeI’m not sure why France gets such a bad rap about being pussies. These seems pretty fucking metal to me. A buncha pure badasses. Oh and fuck these douchebag cops.
US propaganda. The Italians used to be the stereotypical cowards until France refused to join the invasion of Iraq.
"Cheese-eating surrender monkeys" long predates the Iraq war. It comes from their surrender in WWII. Yes, the jokes ignore their resistance movement and the fact that they basically lost an entire generation of young men to WWI. It also ignores that Britain failed to help France.
I have never in my life heard of Italians being stereotypical cowards.
French politicians are the cowards. The people have always been hard as nails.
Plus they are the gold standard for protests. Both in method and motivation.
By whom? Uneducated americans? That's your answer
This message sponsored by the British government?
We will NEVER forget the history!
It's only the Americans. Not sure why either. Historically and always, the French go hard.
It's especially weird because the French going hard is how the colonists got carried to US independence.
I think it's a relatively more recent thing where US conservative anti-France propoganda was very successful when they refused to support one of the US wars in the middle east. Can't remember which but it's where terms like "freedom fries" started popping up and then I think some people retconned France getting their shit pushed in early in WWII as somehow meaning they surrender easily even though in reality they were bearing the brunt of the Nazi invasion. But yeah without the French there would be no USA.
Americans saw the French as surrending cowards due to WWII, long before the while Iraq thing. I have no idea why there are two people in these comments pushing this claim that it's due to the Iraq war.
The jokes were always ignorant, but they've been around since WWII.
The Iraq war. And 20 years later JD Vance said that if Europe were real friends, they wouldn't have let the US drive drunk and go into Iraq.
I just KNEW the Iraq War was somehow Europe's fault! Those fuckers!
Because if this was America, people would be dead.
Seriously, I respect the French here... But this is why. Police and even many citizens are brutal in the US. I'm guessing other places that say these things about the French are the same.
Maybe the police don't kill in France because they know they'd get killed too if they crossed that line. Just a speculation. I'm not sure how many protesters have ever been killed in France.
Here's one which is not directly the police but it's kinda because it's who the police really works for:
- After the 2007 Crash, whilst in Britain the rich were asking for even more tax breaks (and, by the way, got them whilst the rest of the population got Austerity), in France the rich were very publicly saying they should be taxed more.
Now, even if the rich in France were being totally hypocrites in their "demands" and knew the politicians they owned would not actually do it (which was what happened), why would at least some of the rich in France feel the need to very loudly and publicly ask to be taxed MORE even whilst in next door Britain the rich very openly wanted to be made even richer?!
Methinks it's to do with the invention of monsieur Guillot and with the French tradition of the common people taking it to the streets and breaking shit up (and, on occasion, said shit being actual rich people) unlike both the UK and US (both countries which even by comparison with the wider Europe beyon France, have very meek and compliant populations).
That said IMHO, Macron's winning against the Gillet Jaunes has seriously reduced the fear the French elites have of public reactions to their abuses.
Real talk, what makes protests in France so different than the US? At every protest I've seen or been to in the US, protesters are almost always at the mercy of the police. Of course there is often pushback, but it doesn't take much until police are beating, arresting, and less-than-lethaling everyone in sight until protesters are inevitably split up, whittled down, or otherwise herded to where they can be more easily rounded up by police. I've seen cops back down before but it's almost always only temporarily until they can get more reinforcements, and while I know on paper the people outnumber police, there always seems to be more police available.
possibly more accountability
I'd say guns make the difference. When there's a chance that someone in the mob might pull out a gun, police are going to shut that down much more brutally. And protesters know this brutality as well, so they don't let it come that far either...
Judging by what the Black Panthers used to do, it's almost the opposite: when the other side pops up with guns (which in many places in the US is entirelly legal), the police suddenly loses the will to beat people up.
When the system is threatened police are always the same . One of the worst was g8 protest in italy in 2001
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/17/italy.g8
Stefan Bauer dared to answer back: when a German-speaking guard asked where he was from, he said he was from the European Union and he had the right to go where he wanted. He was hauled out, beaten, given a face full of pepper spray, stripped naked and put under a cold shower. His clothes were taken away and he was returned to the freezing cell wearing only a flimsy hospital gown.
Shivering on the cold marble floors of the cells, the detainees were given few or no blankets, kept awake by guards, given little or no food and denied their statutory right to make phone calls and see a lawyer. They could hear crying and screaming from other cells.
Men and women with dreadlocks had their hair roughly cut off to the scalp. Marco Bistacchia was taken to an office, stripped naked, made to get down on all fours and told to bark like a dog and to shout "Viva la polizia Italiana!" He was sobbing too much to obey. An unnamed officer told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that he had seen brother officers urinating on prisoners and beating them for refusing to sing Faccetta Nera, a Mussolini-era fascist song.
Ester Percivati, a young Turkish woman, recalled guards calling her a whore as she was marched to the toilet, where a woman officer forced her head down into the bowl and a male jeered "Nice arse! Would you like a truncheon up it?" Several women reported threats of rape, anal and vaginal.
fucking hell...It amazes me how they manage to find worst of the worst for police departments.
It's pretty logical to conclude that the kind of police officers who chose to become shock police (as in Europe they tend te be a separate part of the police who are trained to break up demonstrations) are the ones who, at best, are fine with beating people in exchange for they themselves getting paid more money than regular police, and at worst actually enjoy it.
They're a self-selected group of people from low empathy all the way up to violent psychopaths (the in Psychology called "functional", in that can control themselves enough to only act on their impulses when they can legally do it).
So, yeah, give such people not just de facto immunity for their actions (which extends even to killing people as long as it can be seen as accidental - as happened in the UK a few years ago) and even actual orders to harm people and they'll do it and then afterwards go back home and sleep like babies.
This profile, good grief
Remember when France deployed tanks and killed thousands of protestors in the 90s. No, because China did that.
Fascists expect other people to be cowards like they are, unfortunately....
