SoylentNews

The continuing saga of the Yellow Vests, Act V [libcom.org] (Lydia Hirsch, Jul 20 2019 20:35):

On the Champs-Élysées, I spoke to a casseur, “breaker,”-- one of the violent protesters who have been the focus of much of the media coverage. He actually walked up to us and volunteered that he was “one of the casseurs.” He, unsurprisingly, seemed a little aggressive, but he was willing to speak and asserted the necessity of violence-- violence is what keeps a mass demonstration going, it’s the energy of it, and without it the demonstration is ineffective because there’s no real threat. An American participating in the protests told me there were two different kinds of casseurs-- les vrai casseurs, the real ones whose eyes were wild with the adrenaline of political violence, and the police infiltrators whose expressions were bureaucratically cold. He said that they sometimes went around trying to start fights with protesters, an opinion shared by a number of others. Though I cannot confirm this, what I saw made me sympathetic to this view.