# machine-translated without any further editing # you may want to read the original, here: # https://lundi.am/Nous-respirons-a-nouveau
WE BREATHE AGAIN
"We know from history, no force is unbeatable"
Appeared in Monday, June 8, 2020 (Monday, June 246, 2020)
May 25, 2020: another image of police brutality on the internet, this time a small eye shaped tab covers it discreetly, the image is blurred and the digital giants - adding their little "benevolent" personal censorship - warn me of the violence of the images I am likely to see. Two months of immobility watching police violence without being able to react, without being able to share my suffering and despair. Two months of powerlessness to balance between denial and exposure, between a necessary protection and a will to know, in a relationship more than ever bulimic to militant news. I hesitate and I pass, I don't click to launch the video, I don't have the courage.
As the cops took to the streets, images of smears swarmed on the internet, the more the police heads took over the public space, the more the police figure dominated online. Apart from private space - and still not for everyone - all living spaces during the lockdown, real or virtual, were saturated by the image of an all-powerful police force. Social networks, the dominant media, but also activists, became the echo chamber of this double symbolic and physical violence. Locked up, inactive, on all screens, the inhuman brutality of the condoms resounds through our optical nerves: in our eyes, our computers and our dreams. The muzzle that falls like a whip on a poor madman who has escaped from the asylum and the door that opens on the passage of a motorbike, the lethal gestures of the cops settle in our imagination and amaze us, taken as we are in our loneliness and our incapacity.
The robotic, untouchable, imperturbable army of the immobile lines of CRS or the shattering irruption of the BRAVs - which we have experienced, put into images or seen - comes to bring down in our inner self the sketches of uncontrolled revolts, muscle relaxation and inconsiderate gestures. The impunity of the police figure that haunts the internet, haunts us and temporarily breaks our rebellion. Inheritors of an impasse in critical thinking, we continue to underestimate the power of images, and create ourselves the oppressive images of the invulnerability of the police.
Yet, as we know from history, no force is unbeatable - think of the royal power invested with the divine: who would dare at the time to attack God's representative on earth - and we know from experience, the police are sometimes vulnerable. Contrary to the claims of security ideology, there is always a flaw in the system, always a mistake or a passage, never the militarization of existence, despite its stupid claims, will ever be total.
Only sometimes fear wins us over and the irrational overrides reason, the magical police figure alienates us more than ever, the all-police man bewitches us, he keeps us wise and mute. I take refuge, I flee and the mechanisms of psychic self-defence are activated, I don't want to see or hear anything anymore. Meanwhile, we beat up outside, we beat up in our neighbourhoods, we beat up, for nothing, for race, for pleasure, for power.
And the pride of the dominant spreads out from his disgusting rightness. I can't breathe. Everywhere their petty stories during the lockdown, their little fake problems, their world "after" even more disgusting and unfair than the one "before". It's suffocating. Their new and comfortable justifications for daily repression. Their untenable indifference to the oppressed, letting them go into the most banal and vile racism. We suffocate in the neighbourhoods, we suffocate in the cities, we suffocate with the police boot on George Floyd's neck, on the necks of blacks, on the necks of activists, on the necks of our comrades. He can't breathe, I can't breathe, we all hold our breath.
But finally George Floyd will never breathe again, the police kill in full light, live. A stranger's neck is crushed in Minneapolis and blows rain down on friends in Paris. Always humanists, the police beat, maim and kill... to save lives. Then the anguish takes over, our breathing gets excited, old marks are revealed, bad memories come back: I am handcuffed - I wear my hands around my neck -. What if he had tightened the handcuffs? What if he had continued? Maybe I'd have died too, just like Floyd. Except he let go of me and sent my head against the hood of their car. "Save," why? Cause I'm white? Maybe, although these days what they call "black" blocks tend to be prime targets for armed racist peacekeepers.
Let us also remember the new High Court of Clichy, an immense ultra-modern maze with a fascist aesthetic where the scoundrel laws are applied, a building besieged by tens of thousands of demonstrators on Tuesday, June 2, 2020. The building visible from all over Paris is only the top of the iceberg of repression, underneath it hides the black part of the pacified world, in its basement: the "depot". A veritable clean dungeon, under the glassed and luminous court of resplendent justice, a gigantic, sanitized and inhuman prison unfolds. Going "to the depot" - while waiting for an immediate appearance for example - is like paying a visit to the other side of the modern world, to a penitentiary universe where humans are treated like animals: abandoned in individual cells for an indeterminate period of time, up to 48 hours, everyone there screams in rage and hits their bars in distress. The policemen are the lords and devils, the prisoners, stripped of their rights, defenceless. The depot is a good example of what can be prison, the CRAs or the madhouse. I saw there the reality of this racist world where eighty percent of the prisoners are racist people who are regularly subjected to this punitive treatment: gardav, depot, prison.
Escorted by two policemen, I am taken to an office where I have to sign in at the depot, I ask for a lawyer and a doctor, both are not on my file, I refuse to go back to my cell but the cop threatens me and says to his colleagues in a threatening way: "Hey guys, the black block doesn't want to sign in". As I go to get my blanket, I witness a chilling scene: two fat white cops shouting orders, in a language he can't understand, to a half-naked migrant, shaking like a leaf. Tears run down his dirty cheeks. In this "other" world, certainly dystopian, for those who live in it or pass through it, shouting the slogan: "cop, rapist, murderer" does not sound like an exaggeration or a mere watchword, but a cathartic ritual, a vital necessity.
We would like to scream at the top of our lungs, but we are out of breath, we can't breathe, we are suddenly alone. On the other side of the world, a black man has died, who will remember him in this dark time? He will join the long funeral procession of the forgotten oppressed, and the image of his unpunished murder will be added to the symbolic weapons of the police. We will remain there, with our images and our regrets, our rage and our pain will be covered with ruins.
Fortunately, the uprisings will bring us relief. They make the rage explode and we throw the pain overboard, we share the suffering with comrades and executioners, we put it in front of the indifferent, we transform it and share it together. Also the uprisings give reason to those raised before, against media sorting, against forgetting, against renunciation, the raised support each other psychically, they ensure the continuity of a power.
Thus in 2019, after the unpunished death of Rémi Fraisse, the mutilations and wounded of the social movements and the expulsions of the zads, the defeat at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, comes the Yellow Vests movement. In 2020, after the repression of the movement against pension reform, the massacre of the Gilets-Jaunes, the unacceptable death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement.
In each new uprising, what is at stake is the mental health of the activists, their capacity to fight over a long period of time - necessary for important transformations such as the removal of the police institution -, the security of the populations who have always been disarmed in the face of the police or their new targets. Here, the current uprising, if it is an epidermal reaction against police violence, if it is a movement for the emancipation of ethnic minorities, if it is an anti-racist movement, whatever happens, it is fighting for all the victims of police violence, and they are very numerous. In reality, it also fights for the "Youth from the suburbs", for the "ultra-left" activists and the criminalized Yellow Vests, as well as for the repressed trade unionists.
The more the Black Lives Matter movement spreads, the more the images of these actions spread, the more the images of barricades in front of the White House and of fires arrive in Europe.
The images of the uprisings heal us, it is no longer our powerlessness that is running in a loop on the social networks, but our power. The world is no longer connected to images of French policemen throwing a racist person in the breast with insults dating back to the Algerian war, but to African-Americans setting fire to the cars of the racist American state. No longer on advertising presentations of police drones by the proto-fascist town hall of Nice, but on demonstrators on horseback raising their fists; a police station burning down, a construction machine used as a battering ram, a heroic boxer demonstrator, monster demonstrations in all the major Western cities ... so many images that give us back our power of action, that frighten the leaders and that circulate our collective intelligence.
We know that a struggle of representations accompanies our struggle, but there is a lot of confusion about it. Let's just say that for each creation of a police drone image, we need an image of a drone shot down with a roll of toilet paper; for each beating, a stoning, etc., we need an image of a police drone. An audiovisual rule that also supposes that before making images you have to create the necessary situation, and see the satisfactory result: when only one car burns and all the media use the image, individual repression is very strong (as in the case of the Valmy dock), when hundreds of cars burn, you are already more quiet.
And then surprise, populations are set ablaze when you least expect it: banned demonstrations, covid19, totalitarian health measures, permanent emotional blackmail, and now tens of thousands of young people, in all the big cities of France, decide not to let it go on any longer and to change the fear of the camp.
The uprisings heal us, we find our brothers and sisters, our comrades, we can finally get our breath back and scream at the top of our lungs, we can clear the police boots that compel us. Show our strength to the police institution and its defenders, threaten the state power with a popular counter-power. We breathe again. And in these processions that are so pleasantly socially mixed, the images create dialectical sparks: the image of Athenians attacking an American embassy in Molotov reminds us of historical elements and the imaginations open up to the possibilities of the past. There are more links in these global revolts with the 1970s - a period when feminist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist movements were even more powerful - with images of the Black Panthers and their allies than with the television images of the "suburban revolt" of 2005. With this uprising and the images it creates, the dominant images are far away now, and we can hope that they will lead to their disappearance, the multiple exotic - and partly racist - fantasies of the supposed alliance of the revolutionary movement with the suburbs.
We breathe better. But an uprising is not a revolution, and experience teaches us this too, the breath is exhausted by only breathing during uprisings and holding the rest of the time in apnea. The question is always the same: how to become solid, how to hold on in time, how to organize ourselves, how to no longer run out of air?
If for the time being the situation is not under control by the government, the media remain silent and the government reflects, the reactionary movement will come sooner or later in the coming weeks. Let us remember - for those who have known it, or share it with those who have not - the month of December in the Yellow Vests: the rioting situation peaked, then fell further and further to suffocate under bloody repression. We can bet that the government will try the same stupid strategy with populations that are all the more easily criminalised the more the state is racist.
Today that we are relieved, let's ask ourselves the right questions, for example: 1) how to preserve a social mix that only a spontaneous movement could allow? 2) how to keep the struggle in an anti-imperialist and internationalist field? 3) how to keep control of the street and the pressure on the forces of law and order 4) how to anchor the movement in time and space?
If the answers to these questions are to be answered with the help of our individual and collective imagination, it is almost certain that we must draw on the historical and necessarily unknown experiences of the American Black Panther Party. There is already there: the evidence of a political foundation by neighborhood, a synthetic organization ranging from childcare to hijacking and "police surveillance patrols":
"In January 1967, the party officially opened its first office in Oakland. Within months of its establishment, it began a patrol campaign to monitor the actions of the city's police. The action was supposed to respond to the seventh point of its program: "We demand an immediate end to police brutality and the killing of blacks. The Black Panthers were inspired by similar actions in Watts, California, the previous summer. Negro Citizen Alert Patrols were organized by equipping vehicles with scanners to listen and track LAPD cars. Equipped with law books and tape recorders, the patrols made sure that every law enforcement action was legal. However, the operation had to be stopped after the police destroyed the recording devices and forcibly dispersed the patrols.
The Black Panthers added an element to the Los Angeles group's initial panoply by arming the participants of the Oakland City surveillance rounds. The group's goal, however, was to stay within the strict framework of legality. It relies on the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America and the laws of the State of California to justify the carrying of concealed weapons by its members. Members receive training on the basic constitutional rights to arrest and carry weapons."
Signed X
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)