Rioting Across France - Astrologer Eric Francis

[Sowelu]

This is an excerpt of a more detailed (including charts) astrological bi-weekly column written by Astrologer/Writer Eric Francis which can be found here: cainer.com/ericfrancis/eric.html

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Astrology Secrets Revealed

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Rioting Across France

Dominating the news these days is, of course, the horrendous situation in France -- rioting initially breaking out in the housing projects of Clichy-sous-Bois, then spreading across the country.

In France, recent events were set off by the electrocution deaths of Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, on the evening of Oct. 27. Here is the chart. This was just a day before the indictment, so we have two crucial historical events emerging with Jupiter in very early Scorpio, and with a Venus-Pluto conjunction.

France is having some wild and ugly scenes. While the US media are turning the story into their usual blend of horror and entertainment, many thousands of cars have indeed been burned (sometimes more than 1,000 in a night) and businesses are being torched, all in what you could view as an enormous, violent, extremely expensive national transformational ritual.

The rioting has spread from the Mediterranean to the German border and even into the heart of Paris on one occasion. France is very fortunate not to be a gun culture like the United States; the cops pretty much do count on not getting shot at.

Something is definitely in the air -- particularly a fixed grand cross that was exact Monday as the Mars retrograde reached its peak. Mars retrograde in Taurus opposed the Sun in Scorpio, marking the exact midpoint in the retrograde process and making an exact square, along with the Sun, to Neptune in Aquarius. Saturn in Leo is nearby. Here is the chart for the grand fixed cross.

Under this energy, there have also been protests and riots in many places during the past week or so, including in Argentina, greeting Bush showing up for a summit of leaders of countries in the Americas, as well as election-related protests in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, and rather vocal demonstrations in London earlier this week, greeting the official state visit of China's President Ho.

The French situation that has surfaced is a very old story, dating back to something called the Algerian War of Independence half a century ago. To make a long story longer, I'm going to provide more than usual political background, because it's relevant to the chart, and because I'm not seeing it anywhere else on the Internet.

Beginning in 1954, Algerian Muslim factions in a French colony waged what began as a guerilla war against France, seeking independence, which evolved into full-on warfare that by some estimates killed 1.5 million people on both sides. Note that the war is having its Chiron return; the crisis began with Chiron in late Capricorn and proceeded through its duration with Chiron in Aquarius. Chiron is now in the process of making the change from Capricorn to Aquarius. So we are seeing unfinished business of the Algerian situation emerge, as is often the case with the Chiron return.

The setting where the riots began is where many Algerian and other North African immigrants and their descendants still live. The curfew laws being used now were originally created for the purpose of quelling crises in France associated with the Algerian war. And the housing projects themselves were created to provide a housing solution for hundreds of thousands of North African immigrants. So there are many throwbacks to one Chiron cycle ago. (But we must remember that this situation, like Iraq, is part of the long, violent struggle between the Christians and the Muslims that goes back almost to the beginning of both religions.)

We are by now familiar with the setting. The interior of Paris, with its grand boulevards, incomparable postcards and 10 euro scrambled eggs, is just one side of city life. The other side is the outside. Beyond the Peripheral, the highway that goes around the central part of the city, there are many little towns featuring housing projects called "Cités." This is an image of being beyond the boundary of Paris, much like Chiron orbits outside the boundary of Saturn. Living on the edge of society has appeared many times in the annals of Chiron. The people out there are indeed outcasts, another theme near and dear to Chiron.

The Cités resemble prisons where African and North African immigrants and their children live, with few jobs, little access to transportation and essentially nothing to do. They are ghettoes in the true sense of the word -- concentrations of certain categories of people. Those who live there are treated as outsiders, and in many respects they are forgotten, excluded members of French society. By all reports, it's a hopeless life, and the young men there are extremely frustrated and restless -- a feeling apropos of Mars retrograde in Taurus.

These young people say they are under constant police harassment, which led to the deaths of the two teenagers Oct. 27.

It has not helped the situation that, instead of offering his regrets over the deaths of the two boys (who feared they were being chased by the cops -- a typical scene), the French minister of the interior, someone of "conservative" persuasion with political aspirations, called Nicolas Sarkozy, referred to the residents of the Cités as rachaille and said he would clean them up with Karcher, a violent, abrasive cleaning system used to strip away extremely hard dirt, such as encrusted pigeon droppings.

There is no exact translation for rachaille, but it's a stupid and mean thing for a government minister to say, particularly when people are suffering from grief, and when the whole situation is so sensitive and volatile. Sarkozy is inflaming an old and unhealed wound, again recalling the Chiron return. In the United States, we call this race baiting: saying or doing something that stirs up racial trouble, and which looks all too intentional.

But true to the nature of Chiron in Capricorn, Sarkozy is playing all his cards and showing us what he's really made of.
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The French National Horoscope and more at this link: cainer.com/ericfrancis/eric.html

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Front page of Astrology Secrets Revealed, with search features, at this link: planetwaves.net/cainer/

[destra]

Sowelu thank you for sharing this. My husband and I have been particularly interested in whats taking place in France.

Much Love
Destra

[penndragon]

The Chickens have come home to roost. Time to pay the piper. This energy cycle is based in integrity. No longer came governments, social classes, and people in general hide behind the lack of integrity we've wittnessed in the passed.

This is meant to happen. It is wrong to be prejiduce, but it is just as wrong to destroy things that don't belong to you. Even when you possess very little. The issue of institutionalized racism lives free and has expanded beyond most peoples awareness.

I see it every day, right here in this country. But, these are new times. Certain standards and old ways will be torn down based on there inability to remain hidden, and or ignored. Has anyone every questioned why those who were left to die in New Orleans were predominately poor and of color?

Energy will continue to bring these things into focus that have been hidden in view for 50 years. If those who needed a Civil Rights Bill, in order to share a toilet seat, isn't the biggest load of you know what known to this world... I don't know what is.

It just goes to show, you may desegregate, but true integration is hard work. And we have not worked hard enough. NO more lies.

Integer:n. whole number
Integration:n. combine into a whole
Intergrity:n. original perfect state; honesty, uprightness

We can not continue to vibrate these sounds without meaning, or they become meaningless and hollow. I think of sound, or words carrying a vibration similar to a bommerang. If they have meaning, they will return to you. If they don't have meaning, they will still return to you. Make your words count. They are precious jewels.

[Nicole]

Very nice Penndragon!

[Sowelu]

Also found on Eric Francis' Planetwaves.net...

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Riots are a class act - and often
they're the only alternative
France now accepts the need for social justice. No
petition, peaceful march or letter to an MP could have
achieved this

Gary Younge
Monday November 14, 2005
The Guardian (Manchester UK)

'IF THERE IS no struggle, there is no progress," said the African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. "Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters ... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

By the end of last week it looked as though the fortnight of struggle between minority French youth and the police might actually have yielded some progress. Condemning the rioters is easy. They shot at the police, killed an innocent man, trashed businesses, rammed a car into a retirement home, and torched countless cars (given that 400 cars are burned on an average New Year's Eve in France, this was not quite as remarkable as some made out).

But shield your ears from the awful roaring waters for a moment and take a look at the ocean. Those who wondered what French youth had to gain by taking to the streets should ask what they had to lose. Unemployed, socially excluded, harassed by the police and condemned to poor housing, they live on estates that are essentially open prisons. Statistically invisible (it is against the law and republican principle to collect data based on race or ethnicity) and politically unrepresented (mainland France does not have a single non-white MP), their aim has been simply to get their plight acknowledged. And they succeeded.

Even as the French politicians talked tough, the state was suing for peace with the offer of greater social justice. The government unrolled a package of measures that would give career guidance and work placements to all unemployed people under 25 in some of the poorest suburbs; there would be tax breaks for companies who set up on sink estates; a €1,000 (£675) lump sum for jobless people who returned to work as well as €150 a month for a year; 5,000 extra teachers and educational assistants; 10,000 scholarships to encourage academic achievers to stay at school; and 10 boarding schools for those who want to leave their estates to study.

"We need to respond strongly and quickly to the undeniable problems facing many inhabitants of the deprived neighbourhoods," said President Chirac. From the man who once said that immigrants had breached the "threshold of tolerance" and were sending French workers "mad" with their "noise and smell" this was progress indeed.

"The impossible becomes probable through struggle," said the African American academic Manning Marable. "And the probable becomes reality."

And the reality is that none of this would have happened without riots. There was no petition these young people could have signed, no peaceful march they could have held, no letter they could have written to their MPs that would have produced these results.

Amid the charred chassis and broken glass there is a vital point of principle to salvage: in certain conditions rioting is not just justified but may also be necessary, and effective. From the poll tax demonstrations to Soweto, history is littered with such cases; what were the French and American revolutions but riots endowed by Enlightenment principles and then blessed by history?

When all non-violent, democratic means of achieving a just end are unavailable, redundant or exhausted, rioting is justifiable. When state agencies charged with protecting communities fail to do so or actually attack them, it may be necessary in self-defence.

After the 1967 riots in American cities, President Johnson set up the Kerner commission. It concluded: "What white Americans have never fully understood - but what the Negro can never forget - is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it." How else was such a damning indictment of racial discrimination in the US ever going to land on the president's desk?

Following the inner-city riots across Britain in 1981, Lord Scarman argued that "urgent action" was needed to prevent racial disadvantage becoming an "endemic, ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of our society". His conclusions weren't perfect. But the kernel of a message black Britons had been trying to hammer home for decades suddenly took centre stage. A few years later Michael Heseltine wrote a report into the disturbances in Toxteth entitled It Takes a Riot.

Rioting should be neither celebrated nor fetishised, because ultimately it is a sign not of strength but weakness. Like a strike, it is often the last and most desperate weapon available to those with the least power. Rioting is a class act. Wealthy people don't do it because either they have the levers of democracy at their disposal, or they can rely on the state or private security firms to do their violent work for them, if need be.

The issue of when and how rioting is effective is more problematic. Riots raise awareness of a situation, but they cannot solve it. For that you need democratic engagement and meaningful negotiation. Most powerful when they stem from a movement, all too often riots are instead the spontaneous, leaderless expression of pent-up frustration void of an agenda or clear demands. Many of these French youths may have had a ball last week, but what they really need is a party - a political organisation that will articulate their aspirations.

If Kerner and Scarman are anything to go by, the rioters will not be invited to help write the documents that could shape racial discourse for a generation. Nor are they likely to be the primary beneficiaries.

"During the 80s, everyone was desperate to have a black face in their organisation to show the race relations industry that they were allowing black people to get on," says the editor of Race & Class, Ambalavaner Sivanandan. "So the people who made this mobility possible were those who took to the streets. But they did not benefit." The same is true of the black American working class that produced Kerner.

Given these uncertain outcomes, riots carry great risk. The border between political violence and criminality becomes blurred, and legitimate protest risks degrading into impotent displays of hypermasculinity. Violence at that point becomes not the means to even a vague aspiration but the end in itself, and half the story gets missed. We heard little from young minority French women last week, even though they have been the primary target of the state's secular dogma over the hijab.

Finally, violence polarises. The big winner of the last two weeks may yet prove to be Sarkozy. The presidential-hopeful courted the far-right with his calculated criticisms of the rioters; if he wins he could reverse any gains that may arise. Le Pen also lurks in the wings.

The riots in France run all these risks and yet have still managed to yield a precarious kind of progress. They demand our qualified and critical support.

Power has made its concessions. But how many, for how long and to whom depends on whether those who made the demands take their struggle from the margins to the mainstream: from the street to the corridors of power.

[e-mail]

www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1641908,00.html
(to use this link one must copy it from here and paste it into the url address line of one's browser window)

[Sowelu]

Whew... there's a controversial yet powerful statement, eh? Hmmmm...

[Nicole]

Wow! So it is!

[penndragon]

Why is it that the races of most countries, including ours, seem to find solace in getting along until all hell breaks loose, but as usual, politicians not only benefit from these quote un-quote race/class struggles continually?

The analysis is simple. Those of color have been used for centuries as a test model for what is planned for all. If you look at revolutions of the past in predominately euro-centric cultures, the people on the other end of these struggles for humanity were mostly caucasian. The French Revolution,The American Revolution and Russian Revolution.

Here is my point. More recent struggles, such as Soweto and South Africa or Vietnam and Algers (50's and 60's)were based not on class, but race. They were presented as class struggles, but they were actually race based confrontations. Colonializm is ever present, and has not yet left Planet Earth.

We just don't call it colonializm anymore. An awareness of this is necessary because the world is doing business with China. It move away partially from Latin America. More than likely because of the lack of fear when it come to facing the enemy, which is poverty. There is a long, proud history is this area of the world when it comes to revolt.

China, on the other hand fought for a communistic approach to rid it self of colonializm, yet in the face of a world wide economy, must maintain a continued vigilant connection to avoid isolationism. Yet, these young, highly state educated workers will not reap the benefits of the fruits of their labor from a state run society.

They will build it, yet not benefit from it. Only a handful will. The stage will be set for the largest revolt that ever took place. And the free world economy will be held hostage because it will bare responsiblity. The world must share information, that is appareent. Democracy can no longer allow people to starve. Socialism can no longer allow people to starve. This will affect all of the working class poor. (the middle classes, not the poor)

This is not only about jobs. This is about the basics. A hungry man, is a dangerous man. And a man that has nothing, has nothing to lose. So give them a job at minimum wage, gas is still $5.00 a liter over there! (Definition of working class poor). No bread, Let them eat cake.

When they say, don't believe the hype, they meant that this reaches far beyond some political solutions. You can't put a band-aid on a gunshot wound.

[sama]

i find it all absolutely tragic nonetheless. when has anything truly been altered for the good by violence?

sama

[destra]

Nothing will be altered by the violence Sama, it will be altered by the depth of feeling and emotion surrounding the violence.

Violence is only one way which people find to express themselves. Give them another way to do so and they will.

I have faith, unabounding faith, that all of the unrest and civil upheaval worldwide will lead towards a greater understanding of social necessity and the need to build a community on honesty, integrity and real democracy.

Much Love,
D.

[penndragon]

When we think of violence, when tend to only attach this statement to humanity. I agree with D'est Ra. Given another way, people would much prefer a fair action plan over loss of life. Every action has an opposite an equal reaction.

Use the Earth for example. We as humans have abused it for decades. It continued to give us warning signs for decades that it was planning its revolt. In Dec of 2004, it set its plan into action, starting with the Tsunami. The year 2005, world wide was nothing more than a precursor to events that will take place until a responsible action plan is put in place.

Like any living entity, there will be a culling of the herd, unless things are placed in balance. The Earth has choosen to cull the herd, based on its treatment. Can you blame it? Hurricanes and other water related weather phenomena, Earthquakes, Wild Fires, Mudslides are just the tip of the iceberg.

The best is yet to come, unless we provide a nurturing environment for planet Earth. The global warming is a fever. The melting of the polar ice cap is sweating caused by the fever. The Hurricanes are regurgitation for bad things place in the stomach. The Wild Fires are hyperthermia. Tornadoes are are dry heaves. Do you see the similarities? Earthquakes are convulsions. The list goes on and on.

When you strip mine, you are depleting the Earth of minerals it needs. When you de-forest, you deplete it of oxygen. When you continue to drill for crude oil or mine for gold, you blow viens. We deny the Earth what it needs, it responds violently. We have the technology to become much more advance than we have at this point. And, we continue to treat OUR planet like a slave to our experiments. If it can survive these experiments, it will revolt. Much like the Tuskeegee Experiments by the U.S. government on African Americans during the 1940's. They survived to tell the tale, and the revolution for abusive treatment was set in place.

So violence is not only relegated to humanity. Highly paid scientist need to communicate the truth before there is a greater loss of life. They need to reveal all known truth about the planet Earth, the evironment in which we live, and all known evidence about humanity. It is a symbiotic relationship that will no longer be denied.

The clock is ticking. Sometimes violence is the only wake up call that will be recognized. If it works for the Earth, it will certainly work for others.