In a notorious incident in Paris last year, a gang of “anti-fascists” attacked and burned a police car, assaulting the officers inside it. Despite their being masked, several of the thugs were identified and apprehended, and have been put on trial. As it turns out, these violent youngsters are from “good families”, and are not desperate and destitute proletarians, as the mythologists of the left would have us believe.
Below is a composite of three video reports on the topic, plus an article. Many thanks to Ava Lon for the translations, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
Here’s an article about the case from last year in Riposte Laïque, also translated by Ava Lon:
Antonin Bernanos, the Antifa militiaman of the beautiful neighborhoods
By Marcus Graven
May 21, 2016Horrifying to report: a black man receiving strokes from a whip wielded by a white man. This black could have burned alive in the car set on fire by masked whites.
But the horror is mitigated by the fact that the black wears a police uniform and the white is an Antifa.
The mainstream media were embarrassed. How to present the information?
It’s impossible to launch into “a cowardly racist aggression against a black policeman and a young woman terrorized by the violence of the Antifas.”
They then chose the very non-political word “casseurs” [breakers]. And with a little luck, these “pigs in a blanket” [in French “roasted chicken”, because ‘chicken’ is derogatory term for a policeman] as the text proclaimed on the piece of cardboard placed in front of the car in flames — were perhaps of the far right.
A few hours later some of the attackers were arrested. A name came out: Antonin Bernanos. A friend of Clément Méric’s, a young man who was almost nice and whom the terrible right-wing extremists allegedly murdered one evening in June 2013. Like him, Antonin is a member of the anti-fascist action group Paris-Banlieue. [Clément Méric,18, was badly beaten in a clash between far-right and Antifa in Paris, in 2013, and later died.]
A shadow passes. So not all Antifas are angels?
The JDD [Le Journal Du Dimanche — the Sunday Newspaper] describes him as a “scion of a good family, living in the district of Montparnasse and working in Issy-les-Moulineaux (Hauts-de-Seine)”.
A standard copy of the far left. Like Méric.
The expression “scion of a good family” suggests that a French working-class youth who votes National Front is from a “bad family”.
Bernanos. The name sounds familiar.
Bernanos as in: the author of Under the Sun of Satan and A Diary of a Country Priest? As in: the militant of Action Française, the fervent Catholic, the admirer of General de Gaulle?
Antonin is apparently his great-grandson.
Another shadow passes.
That is where we are. The so-called proletarians in revolt against the system live in beautiful neighborhoods, in bourgeois families and are educated on the left by bobo [bourgeois-boheme, French yuppies, also called ‘caviar Left’] parents who prefer illegal immigrant to the native French.
Antonin Bernanos and his brother, [translator: his name is Angel (sic!)] arrested at the same time, were known to the police for their violence. They should have been banned from demonstration, but our justice always acting as “wall of a**holes” decided otherwise. “Go, my dear Antonin, go and beat the cop to pulp”, whispered the administrative tribunal in his ear, considering the prefect of police produced “no evidence that the suspect personally participated in these abuses and violence.”
A third shadow passes.
The media are not well-disposed to take stock of the situation. They have always stood on the side of the Antifas, these red fascists attacking the identitarians, massacring supporters of the national right.
Wasn’t it they who, a few days ago, in Paris, assaulted the singer from the right Goldofaf [right-wing rapper] with hammer and truncheon?
A limping army of shadows: Mélenchon’s [Communist politician] unswerving support of the antifas, Valls [French socialist politician, former PM] who mourned the death of Méric, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet [French politician affiliated with right, conservatives] who attended to the service where homage was paid to this wonderful thug boy of the left against the families of the Manif for all. [conservative French movement supporting traditional family]
As for the admirer of erotic spanking, Cazeneuve, [French socialist politician] he never for a moment thought of asking for the dissolution of the antifa militia.
Video transcript (times taken from three separate original videos):
| 00:08 | Chant: We must switch off the police! | |
| 00:37 | It seems that the tribunal hasn’t heard us completely, | |
| 00:41 | since they maintain the culpability of the majority of the accused | |
| 00:45 | and also of my client Antonin Bernanos. | |
| 00:49 | After explaining for a very long time that there were a number of doubts, | |
| 00:53 | which we mentioned during the hearing, he considered that there was | |
| 00:58 | a perfect resemblance between the attacker and Antonin Bernanos, | |
| 01:02 | which seems to me a little contradictory. | |
| 00:00 | Faced with the violence of the riots against the Labor Law, the police are denouncing | |
| 00:04 | anti-cop hate, and François Hollande maintains his case. | |
| 00:08 | While the police officers were demonstrating, a car of one of their colleagues was burned | |
| 00:12 | by the left wing. “May 18th is when the police announced that they were the right-wing. | |
| 00:16 | The moment the police announce that they are right wing, they are attacking what is happening | |
| 00:20 | between the right wing [and the left]. We want to break the movement and a social protest, and | |
| 00:24 | we want to place in the heart of that demonstration anti-racist and anti-fascist elements. Because | |
| 00:28 | we cannot separate the anti-fascist fight from the social struggle. So we are an element | |
| 00:32 | [unintelligible] element!” Antonin, 22 years old, has been incarcerated for the last | |
| 00:36 | Ten months in the prison of Fleury-Mérogis. The investigators suspect him | |
| 00:40 | of being connected to the arson of a police car; among four suspects arrested, in their 20s, | |
| 00:44 | three were forbidden to demonstrate; the judge ordered | |
| 00:48 | his release three times, but the court appealed every time, | |
| 00:52 | leaving the family baffled. The detention became the principle and not | |
| 00:56 | the exception. —We met several times | |
| 01:00 | during rallies, which I was covering, I saw you; you are | |
| 01:04 | a demonstrator. What happened on May 18th? —Well, on May 18th | |
| 01:08 | there was a rally of the police officers on the Place de la République, organized | |
| 01:12 | by the police union, a rally “against anti-cop hate” | |
| 01:16 | which was seen as a violent provocation in the context of the spread | |
| 01:20 | of police violence at the same time in the ’hoods, but also at the rallies, | |
| 01:24 | and the Place de la République is at that point the very heart of a social movement. | |
| 01:28 | So on that day, May 18th, there was the rally of the radicalized police officers, | |
| 01:32 | where there were also present — among others — personalities from the right wing and of the | |
| 01:36 | the hardcore right, such as Marion Maréchal-Le Pen , Gilbert Collard or Eric Ciotti. | |
| 01:40 | They were all gathered on the square, and close to the square the collective | |
| 01:45 | “Emergency! our Police are Assassinating!” organized a counter-rally | |
| 01:49 | to protest against this police provocation. While the gathering of police officers was | |
| 01:53 | authorized by the prefecture, the gathering of “Emergency! our Police are Assassinating”, | |
| 01:57 | launched by Amal Bentounsi, was forbidden 45 minutes | |
| 02:01 | after the start of the rally. —It was very surprising, it was against | |
| 02:05 | the usual mobilization on the Place de la République, there for one of the first times anyway | |
| 02:09 | I can remember, la Place de la République was closed; in fact, it was “privatized” by the police, | |
| 02:13 | and only police officers — I stayed in front of it for quite a long time — and only police officers | |
| 02:17 | with a police ID or [unintelligible] could enter the square. —What is going on in back? | |
| 02:21 | Pushed away by the police officers, some of the demonstrators decide | |
| 02:25 | to go to the rally, and on the way to that demonstration | |
| 02:29 | a police vehicle was taken by the mob and set on fire, which | |
| 02:33 | was to result in all the subsequent fuss in the media concerning | |
| 02:37 | the “case of May 18th”. | |
| 00:04 | Here is a picture coming from France, which went viral all over the world | |
| 00:08 | If you remember it was in May 2016, during a rally | |
| 00:12 | against the El Khomri Law a police vehicle was set on fire [Myriam El Khomri— Minister of Labor] | |
| 00:16 | with two officers inside. Eight suspects are on trial | |
| 00:20 | beginning tomorrow. They were wearing balaclavas and masks during the events. | |
| 00:24 | How have they been finally identified? It’s the exclusive investigation completed by | |
| 00:28 | George Bernier and David Salman. The investigation was as much a top priority as it was complicated: | |
| 00:33 | no faces or DNA, but a certainty at the time that the aggressors were hiding among those armies of | |
| 00:37 | extremely violent anti-fascist militants. A little mistake on their side | |
| 00:44 | and the police were able to put names to this crowd of black clothes | |
| 00:48 | and anonymous. Like this suspect who is breaking one of the windows of the car | |
| 00:52 | with a metal rod. His two-color hat and his red sunglasses | |
| 00:56 | will put the police investigators on the on the trail of a Basque anarchist, | |
| 01:00 | 31 years old. His blond ponytail and his mole will do the rest of the job. | |
| 01:04 | The man who is destroying the windscreen will turn out | |
| 01:08 | to be an American transgender [female], a philosophy student, | |
| 01:12 | betrayed by her tattoos and her black jacket, uncovered | |
| 01:16 | during the search. A pair of underpants also found itself in the heart of the investigation: | |
| 01:20 | rose, fuchsia or violet, depending on the version, it will | |
| 01:25 | in any case “unmask” this sociology student, 23 years old, the scion of a good family, | |
| 01:29 | a descendent of the writer George Bernanos, but suspected | |
| 01:33 | of hitting the police officer Kévin Philippi, and then breaking | |
| 01:37 | the back window of the vehicle. The very dark circles under his eyes | |
| 01:41 | were stronger proof than all his alibis. Another shocking profile: | |
| 01:45 | the one belonging to the man with the iron bar. His red and white sport shoes | |
| 01:49 | and his goatee allowed the police | |
| 01:53 | to compare him to this demonstrator photographed in a navy blue jacket | |
| 01:57 | just before the attack. An IT engineer, 37 years old, | |
| 02:01 | former boy scout, grandson of a soldier, he | |
| 02:05 | never decided to get rid of his “casseur” [breaker] outfit. | |
| 02:09 | Two casseurs won’t be tried: the author of the kick, still not identified, | |
| 02:13 | and this Swiss student, 28 years old, on the run; | |
| 02:17 | he is suspected of throwing the smoke grenade. His blond curls | |
| 02:21 | assured him an international arrest warrant. |
mythologists of the left
Good one!!
Thank you Ava Lon.
The coverage of Europe by GoV is first-class journalism of the real, not popular entertainment, type.
The statements of the Antonin Bernanos defense verge into incoherence. The left tries to shift the focus from violent law-breaking and intimidation. They throw up some inchoate cloud of denials, whines, and complaints which, if you don’t think about it for 10 seconds, kind of justifies a fuzzy feeling of injustice.
The leftists basically think differently from conservatives, populists, nationalists, and workers. They can view the same facts, but the logic trains do not play a part in leftist conclusions. It’s very weird.
Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message”. The preferred medium of the leftists is violent protest. Against what, they don’t really know. They are rebels without a cause.