I went to bed on Saturday (17 October) glued to my X feed on the French riots and it was impossible not to react emotionally to images of familiar landmarks in Paris in flames.
It was a mistake to have followed things on the far-right propaganda tube of racist US oligarch Elon Musk, which both glorified and reviled its AI-curated clips of violent clashes between mostly white policemen and young black or Arab men.
But in any case, I felt pity for police facing Molotov cocktails and cobble stones and angry about their use of stun grenades that left young people maimed.
I was shocked to see public buildings and luxury shops in Lyons, Marseille, and Paris set on fire and looted in what looked like pure criminality, rather than liberté, égalité, fraternité.
But the anarchist adrenaline in me also said: “Fuck Louis Vuitton! A shop that sells luggage for the price of most families’ monthly incomes is a perfect symbol of the social inequality at the heart of this eruption of public anger”.
I woke up on Sunday thankful to learn from professional media, such as the BBC, that even if Paris looked like a war zone, no one had been killed, and even though police had made 1,800 arrests, violent thugs were a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of people who had peacefully protested for better living conditions and education.
But the political harm of Saturday’s X-streamed violence, which also erupted in Italy and Belgium, was still enormous and it will help the EU and French people’s enemies – the far-right in Europe, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and US president Donald Trump.
This article continues, but the full version is available only to EUobserver.com subscribers. Visit account.euobserver.com/membership