r/worldnews • u/YouProfessional3196 • 1h ago
Town hall in Limoges 'largely lost' to blaze set during French protests
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/fire-rages-town-hall-frances-185017906.html•
u/oldhellenyeller 29m ago
“Your universe has no meaning to them. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door...”
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u/nithrean 1h ago
This sounds like it has become an outright riot.
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u/ludvikskp 48m ago edited 44m ago
I think things have escalated and a lot of malicious people have taken advantage to loot, destroy and burn. Which is pretty scary… like what did that late 1800s historical building do to anyone
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u/SufficientGolf6953 1h ago
It's a fine line.
Once you have a large crowd of protesters amped up on emotion, then that angry mob takes on a life of it's own and can quickly become a riot if there is any escalation.
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u/Outside_Nebula568 56m ago
But its not just giant mobs finding lives of their own, its specific smaller groups going out seeking violence
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u/PretentiousSparrow 57m ago edited 51m ago
And there's Le Pen's TV ad for the election next year. The scale of the stupidity of this is genuinely mind-blowing.
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u/Forest_Orc 53m ago
Or someone knew what they were doing.
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u/Killoah 32m ago
Not everything is planned like that. Some people are just really fucking stupid and do their opponents bidding for them
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u/PretentiousSparrow 30m ago
Absolutely. But it is far from impossible that the idiots received some encouragement from those with an interest in this happening.
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u/TheFeshy 41m ago edited 37m ago
This sort of thing was happening during BLM protests in the US. People seem to have forgotten that police were shot and a police station set on fire by right-wing agitators who were then convicted of those crimes. The trial evidence reveals it was explicitly done for the purpose of creating more violence and support for their side by blaming the BLM protestors.
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u/humanistic_humanist 23m ago
Ummm, citation please?
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u/TheFeshy 7m ago
Sure thing! You can start with the wikipedia article, because the group did a lot more than just the murder and fire starting - but some of it was stopped. You can google any of those names for more details. Ivan Huner was the one who started the fires (after firing into a building full of people with an AK-47), and Steven Carrillo was the one who murdered a Federal officer (Sorry, before I edited the comment I said murdered a police officer, accidentally conflating murdering the fed with shooting the police building.)
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u/PretentiousSparrow 52m ago
Exactly. State agitators could well be involved in something like this (Russia seems like a plausible culprit).
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u/Jean-Luc-1701 35m ago
Stop making up excuses for violent thugs.
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u/PretentiousSparrow 32m ago
I'm not excusing them, I'm saying it would be incredibly on brand for the enemies of Europe and democracy - first and foremost Russia - to be using agitators to encourage this sort of behaviour. Doesn't absolve the idiots who go along with it of their own responsibility though.
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u/degaullex 11m ago
Don't worry, as a French person, we don't need any foreign power to sabotage ourselves.
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u/ProfessionalZebra384 46m ago
Protesting for better public services, and they’ve now added restoration of a 150 year old building to the balance sheet.
I was there recently and it’s a really nice Hôtel de Ville. I hope the idiots responsible are caught.
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u/Objective-Rip3008 51m ago
Crazy part is france isn't even dealing with the worst of it yet, wait for them to go bankrupt and start the austerity measures
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u/_hhhnnnggg_ 19m ago
The issue is that most of France is already under austerity. Cuts to education in the last few decades is the main reason for the student protests, but the same thing can be observed in other aspects like social security for unemployed, public services, etc.
Pensions got some cut but that's still negligible, and tax cut for the riches deepens the deficit further.
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u/Aesma42 14m ago
Nothing has been cut yet, spending is up every year.
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u/TensionAntique3075 7m ago
Yeah, but they have still cut spendings in large parts of the economy, while keeping the advantages to the wealthy, the pensioneers and the private companies as high as possible.
Government worker's pays have essentially been frozen and not aligned on inflation for more than a decade now. Including teachers.
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u/fulthrottlejazzhands 42m ago
Austerity measures in France? Je n'en comprend pas.
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u/twitterpan 22m ago
"les mesures d'austérité" but for some reason, the acronym always spells "riot" in French
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u/reubTV 38m ago
They will have no choice. Austerity or kicked out of EU
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u/VeryluckyorNot 7m ago
No Greece wasn't kicked out with their worst debt, we gonna be Greece 2.0 someone gonna watch if we are doing good " mise sous tutelle " ...
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u/Significant-Kale 20m ago
France cannot go bankrupt and recent indicators are not so alarming when you know their history even in just the last 20 years
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u/ScepticalFrench 16m ago
start the austerity measures
Start ? It's all our governments ever talked about since Sarkozy. We're tired of lies and fairy tails. They're incompetent and it's getting impossible to hide it now. We'll bring them to the ground, even if it means going with them.
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u/YodaForceGhost 57m ago
Le Pen campaign must be loving this. She gets elected and everyone involved in these “protests” are gonna get sent away ICE-style
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u/ZerochildX23 38m ago edited 4m ago
LOL, good luck with that. If she tries that, a general-strike would occur in the country & she would get overthrown. Edit
Seems like more data-centers need to be taken off-line.
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u/Genevieve_Vavance743 25m ago
a general-strike would occur
There is no one who wants these people deported more than the actual French working class.
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u/Ozzman770 30m ago
I hope your right but I'm getting PTSD flashbacks to when we were all saying "luckily even if Trump does win he won't be able to do half the crazy stuff he's talking about cause the pushback would be enormous". Don't count on the future to have your back is all I'm saying
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u/TorchbeareroftheStar 42m ago edited 40m ago
Average French protester mindset:
"We want better funded schools"
Destroy and raid schools
"We want better public services and government communication"
Burn down buses and a town hall
All these take money to repair which could have been used for other stuff btw
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u/ArtemisXD 16m ago
Just so you know, today's protest/riot was initially called for the revival of the yellow vest movement (in 2018 and 2019, which pretty much always escalated into hyper violence on the side of the protesters) movement, before the student protests even started. Since the date was chosen a long time in advance, lots of people joined in the chaos for their personnal benefits, right now there's still chaos in Paris, and at 10 pm i saw either people wanting to fight the police, trash stuff for the fun of it, or looters who want to get free stuff.
The date was chosen in memory of the 17th of october 1962 where some 300 algerians drowned in the Seine after being pushed by the police
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u/Rich-Badger-7601 35m ago
It's clear that the only solution here is to further increase pensioner benefits
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u/NationalisticMemes 1h ago
The protesters logic: We have elections coming up soon, let's rob and burn cars and buildings. And then we'll complain about the police being mean.
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u/Eddyzk 59m ago
Why would you assume that protestors did this rather than people just out to sow mayhem, using protests as a cover?
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u/NationalisticMemes 55m ago
That's an interesting position. So you think it's just some "bad people" doing this? Then it follows that the police should stop all these "bad people," and the protesters shouldn't interfere, right?
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u/Koala_eiO 33m ago
Yes. What kind of "gotcha" is this? There is no trap. The police should arrest everyone around protests (and they may not be protesters, accept that) who is burning buildings.
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u/Eddyzk 54m ago
If someone is causing trouble, absolutely.
You did not answer my question.
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u/NationalisticMemes 50m ago
Because your question is meaningless, since the robbers and arsonists are also participants in the protest that turned into pogroms. They may have different thoughts about what's happening in the country, but they are participants.
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u/VanAgain 56m ago
Or ... they're fed up and acting in the only democratic way open to them beyond electing more corrupt leaders.
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u/NationalisticMemes 53m ago
And in the end, another corrupt person will win the elections. So what is the real plan?
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u/Low_Technician7346 5m ago
Remember that Putin is trying to make the protests more violents and to divide people up so they would elect Rassemblement National (funded by putin)
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u/PowerOfTheSchwartzz 29m ago
Why are the police so completely useless?
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u/Significant-Kale 21m ago
They are spread thin, and many of them are already tired from the last 2 weeks.
The government who has setup their work protocol did it very poorly, so imo they are very inefficient in their action. Sometimes they are ordered to charge at people who are protesting peacefully and are trying to evacuate large groups of people through violence when there is no reason for them to do so, wasting their time and energy when they could stop real culprits from doing all the burning.
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u/Shoddy_Job3386 10m ago
Just in my town, there were hundreds of people breaking, stealing, fighting. There is not a single police in the world with enough members to handle this shit.
Even less with they are actually allowed to do, no matter what the opposant say.
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u/Alwaystired59 42m ago
These leftists are out of control
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u/Significant-Kale 19m ago
Could be right wing extremist steering up the pot. Recently one of them was planning terro attacks and got caught before doing it
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u/Alwaystired59 16m ago
Eh, the left takes the blame for everything, so the truth doesn’t really matter. The world will rally behind the right as is the rage these days
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u/Able_Ad_4874 1h ago
The revolution will not be televised
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u/Outside_Nebula568 54m ago
lol its not a revolution when the person leading the elections promises to deport the people doing it
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u/Narrative_Robot_9001 31m ago
Ah yes the revolution against the liberal govt that will checks notes guarantee Le Pen’s victory.
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u/Stamperdoodle1 20m ago
I'm a bit OOTL - what is happening in France? What are these protests/riots about? Who are they and what do they hope to achieve?
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u/AyAyPirates 2m ago
Today was to protest against the government, billionaires and cost of living, but there have been high school and college protests every day for almost a month because of the lack of funding in education. Young people are very angry about Macron
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u/Tsigorf 28m ago
If I may give some insight, I'm supporting the protests and supporting all the demands towards better funding for our institutions and better wealth distribution, exactly what the students started protesting for quickly joined by many other protesters.
Protesters would NOT burn the very institutions they're protesting and fighting for. They are not protesters. I will not defend this.
There's several proofs these past days of outsiders sneaking in to break or even burn buildings. Several schools got burned by people who weren't even students.
We don't know who did this, their faces were covered. Do not jump onto conclusions. This is NOT the way protesters want to protest.
I'm a bit sad, though, that police is more busy assaulting and mutilating protesters and even bystanders outside of the protests, majority of which being children, while unable to prevent this. Given some footage and testimonies we got from policemen, they know very well that their tactics are sometimes the worst ones to prevent this.
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u/Shoddy_Job3386 6m ago
I saw hundreds of young man in Lille rioting, breaking, stealing, all while laughing hard at it. They were not outsider at all.
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u/ossaar 21m ago
Bro, you need austerity not more funding. You realize that you will drag the rest of us with you? This is like when the rest of the world watch the US take stupid decisions which end up affecting all of us, but on a intra-EU scale.
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u/Tsigorf 16m ago
No, we need better wealth distribution, the opposite of what our governments did for decades and is still considering doing this year in the for the 2027's budget.
There's also been decades the left-wing suggested alternatives which were thrown away by the government. There are alternatives in order to increase the French budget and get a better spending distribution.
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u/fkenned1 53m ago
You know what, I actually don't even care right now. If the white house were to burn to the ground, I wouldn't care. I'm tired of what's happening in this world. Nobody in power seems to be taking their citizens seriously. If this is what needs to happen to get their attention, then so be it. I'm just not gonna act like I care anymore. Things are already fucked. They just don't look like it on the outside.
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u/AlternativeHour1337 48m ago
yeah lets turn every state into a totalitarian police state where no one has any rights anymore, seems like a great idea
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u/fkenned1 44m ago
We already live in one.
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u/AlternativeHour1337 42m ago
no we do not, and the fact that you think we do shows that you absolutely do not know what you are talking about
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u/beyondbase 42m ago
Why would it have to be a police state when gentle anarchy could be an option?
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u/AlternativeHour1337 41m ago
there is no "gentle" anarchy
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u/beyondbase 31m ago edited 25m ago
Name some societies in the 20/21 century that’s lived true anarchism and not just used as a false label for ineffective or hostile organized governance. I’d certainly prefer it over totalitarianism.
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u/AlternativeHour1337 27m ago
as a german i can give you one example - germany during the end of ww2
and you really really dont want to experience that kind of thing, i'm glad my grandma survived it but only because she happened to be inside of the american zone
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u/Pwoinklokinoid 1h ago
I think the term "Protest" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.