The Mainstream Media Would Go Wild If France’s Million-Person Protest Happened In Russia

The Mainstream Media, their government allies, and those two’s on-the-ground proxies have incessantly tried in vain over the past year to provoke large-scale protests in Russia along the lines of what France just experienced last week for the purpose of delegitimizing its government and distracting the security services with an artificially manufactured domestic crisis.

The French Interior Ministry acknowledged that over one million people participated in nationwide protests on Thursday against Macron’s unilateral raising of the pension age. The security services harshly cracked down on some of the demonstrators, but the Mainstream Media (MSM) mostly avoided informing their audience about this. Nobody should doubt that they’d have gone wild had France’s million-person protest happened in Russia, however, especially if there was a crackdown too.

They, their government allies, and those two’s on-the-ground proxies have incessantly tried over the past year to provoke exactly that for the purpose of delegitimizing the Russian government and distracting the security services with an artificially manufactured domestic crisis. These efforts were futile due to the targeted population’s fierce patriotism, which largely inoculates them from the pernicious influence of foreign actors.

One million people is a critical mass that’s more than capable of effecting meaningful political change even in the face of a hardcore crackdown like the one that Macron ordered to be carried out against his own citizens. While it’s premature to predict whether this movement will succeed in getting him to reverse his unilateral raising of the pension age, the very fact that so many people came together to protest this says a lot about how unpopular that move was.

This unexpected development naturally prompts some observations about the state of democracy in the West, especially considering how desperately the MSM is downplaying these protests and Macron’s crackdown against them. For starters, the French leader resorted to employing a constitutional measure for imposing his political will without putting it up to a vote in the National Assembly. While legal, it’s nevertheless scandalous and proves that he knew he was going against the people’s wishes.

This in turn confirms that Western democracy doesn’t perfectly represent the population unlike what it’s most passionate supporters who want to export it abroad claim. In reality, this system has its shortcomings just like any other, but the crucial difference is that the MSM rarely engages in much-needed self-criticism about this form of government in order to avoid discrediting it in the eyes of the global majority that resides in non-Western countries and practices a national form of democracy.

These double standards are emblematic of the West’s “rules-based order”, which is actually all about the arbitrary implementation thereof in advance of American interests, sometimes even at the cost of its own reputation as proven by its hypocritical approach to the “International Criminal Court”. The use of state force is supported by the West if it’s meant to maintain the rule of a friendly leader like Macron while condemned in the case of unfriendly non-Western leaders like Iran’s or Russia’s doing the same.

It’s unimportant whether the argument can be made in either example that a crackdown was required to maintain law and order for the safety of the general population since the point is that the West doesn’t apply the same standards towards these situations for purely political reasons. No major politicians or influential media professionals will call for sanctions against Macron, the French government, and/or the country as a whole like they’d do against Iran or Russia in such a scenario.

There’s also no chance of them granting political asylum to those French who flee their country after the latest violence, nor will any Western country host any figures or groups agitating for violent regime change against Macron. The West might feel uncomfortable with the optics of over one million people protesting against him and the resultant crackdown that ensued since it draws attention to the points made thus far int his piece, but they’ll still treat France differently than they’d do Iran or Russia.

The takeaway is that the principles traditionally associated with Western democracy aren’t truly as sacrosanct as the media and state officials in that de facto New Cold War bloc claim. Its system of governance isn’t any better or worse than its non-Western counterparts’ per se, but the crucial difference is that the MSM doesn’t often engage in self-criticism of it like they do others’. These double standards are a feature of Western democracy and not a bug as a growing number of folks are realizing.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/the-mainstream-media-would-go-wild