Gilets Jaunes: Catalyst for a Global Movement?
France is at a crossroad. A fairly benign bread-and-butter protest has turned into a major popular dissent putting in question France’s political system. It is new, unheard of, and because we live in the digital age, with immediate communication, the world is not only watching, but there is a contagious factor to it, which in […]
Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Genius Who Embodied the Enlightenment
Enslavement by the Enlightened in Revolutionary Times In 1789, the year of the French Revolution, Saint Domingue, now Haiti, was the world’s richest colony. The source of this wealth was the exploitation of half a million black slaves who furnished the labor for the sugar, indigo, cotton, cocoa, coffee, and tobacco extracted from over 2,000 […]
Reinventing Marxism for Our Times
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was one of the most prescient philosophers, whose influence is felt even today. It could be said about him that he is read wherever printed literature or optical fiber has reached. But what does Marx mean to us today? How do we interpret Marx for our changed times? I remember that by […]
Gilets Jaunes Referendum by Initiative of Citizens (RIC): Push to Revive a Democracy
The illusion of democracy The Gilets Jaunes movement took most observers and so-called experts in France and worldwide entirely by surprise, but it was actually completely predictable. The crisis simmered below the radars of France’s politicians, media, as well as those who considered themselves the enlightened figures of the intelligentsia for 50 years. By their […]
Are the Gilets Jaunes Today’s Sans-Culottes?
“Pour le peuple, il y a toujours la misère!” Anonymous Gilet Jaune From the Island of La Reunion to the Napoleonic symbol that is the Arc de Triomphe, through big and small towns, as well as the usually bucolic countryside in France, there is something special in the air: the smell of fires on barricades, […]
