Silencing Dissent, Enforcing Empire: France’s ‘Republican Values’ Go Mask-Off

By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | April 30, 2025

I. Silencing Dissent, Enforcing Empire: France’s ‘Republican Values’ Go Mask-Off

The ABC News article opens with a familiar formula: neutral tone, bureaucratic language, and a total absence of political context. It reports that France is banning “activist groups” — groups that, according to Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, are “extremely violent” and “a threat to the Republic.” The reader is meant to nod along in liberal concern, trusting that if the government labels a group as dangerous, then it must be true. No names, no history, no critique — just the cold language of security management.

But strip away the euphemisms, and here’s what’s really happening: the French state is outlawing resistance. It’s banning anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian movements, criminalizing leftist and anti-fascist organizing, and targeting climate, labor, and anti-racist formations. In fact, Darmanin’s announcement followed direct police repression of protests against Israeli genocide in Gaza — protests that were overwhelmingly led by Black, Arab, and Muslim youth, migrants, and the working class. These are not “violent extremists.” They are the very people who’ve been on the receiving end of French imperialism for centuries.

The article dutifully omits all of this. Instead, it centers the political ambitions of far-right figure Marine Le Pen and her “Republican rival” Darmanin — as if the only question worth asking is who can better manage France’s internal enemies. It frames the ban as a move to “reinforce public order,” and notes that Darmanin is “striking a hard line on extremism.” There is no mention of Palestine. No mention of police brutality. No mention of France’s colonial war against its own migrant neighborhoods.

That silence is the propaganda. That omission is the lie. When empire begins to collapse, it no longer cares to manufacture consent — it simply criminalizes dissent. The so-called “Republican values” of the French state were forged in the blood of Haitian rebels, Algerian resistance fighters, and African workers. Today, those same values are invoked to ban anyone who dares expose that history — or fight to end its continuation.

II. From Algiers to Gaza: France’s War on the Colonial Underclass

The French state is not banning “activist groups.” It is waging counterinsurgency against the colonized classes within its own borders — just as it has done for centuries beyond them. When Darmanin outlaws pro-Palestinian groups, when Le Pen calls to criminalize “Islamo-leftism,” when Macron deploys militarized police to occupy working-class suburbs — what we are witnessing is the reactivation of France’s colonial war machine on the domestic front. The target is clear: Black and Arab youth, Muslim communities, undocumented migrants, anti-Zionist Jewish organizers, and the radical Left. These are not just “citizens” — they are the captive colonies of a still-active French empire.

The repression is not new. It is a continuation of the same logic that drove the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961, the torture chambers of the FLN war, the prison firebombings in Guadeloupe, and the assassination of Thomas Sankara. It is the logic of a bourgeois state in permanent crisis — facing a legitimacy collapse at home, and a geopolitical unraveling abroad. And so, like all imperial powers in decline, it turns inward, criminalizing dissent, outlawing memory, and preemptively neutralizing resistance.

And it’s not just France. The same playbook is active in the United States, where the Department of Justice recently indicted members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), including 82-year-old Chairman Omali Yeshitela, for allegedly “spreading Russian propaganda.” Their real crime? Daring to call for Black Power, reparations, and anti-imperialist unity with oppressed peoples worldwide. The state is resurrecting Cold War–era laws to target Black revolutionary organizing — labeling internationalism a threat, and solidarity a conspiracy.

France and the U.S. are not just allies — they are imperial co-conspirators in the repression of global liberation movements. Whether it’s the APSP in Florida, youth in Nanterre, Palestinian solidarity groups in Toulouse, or anti-Zionist activists in Oakland — the message is the same: there will be no tolerance for those who expose empire’s crimes, uplift the colonized, or demand liberation on their own terms.

But the people are not confused. They know the difference between terrorism and resistance. Between fascism and liberation. Between a government defending “republican values” and one defending colonial profits. That’s why the French police have to storm classrooms. That’s why U.S. courts have to gag revolutionaries with espionage laws. That’s why Gaza solidarity is met with riot cops, not dialogue.

Because the real threat is not violence — it’s clarity. It’s the possibility that the colonized underclasses of the Global North will unite with the oppressed of the Global South. That Black radicals in St. Louis and migrant youth in Marseille will begin to speak the same language of power — and act accordingly.

III. The Mask Slips, the System Exposed: France as a Technofascist Adopter

France still postures as the defender of “liberty” — the birthplace of Enlightenment and the proud guardian of republican values. But in the cold light of class war, the mask has slipped. What we are seeing today is not the degeneration of democracy, but the deployment of technofascist control — the digital-police fusion of capital, surveillance, and repression. Yet France is not pioneering this transformation. It is adopting a template forged in the United States, the undisputed global vanguard of technofascism. From predictive policing to protest criminalization to narrative suppression, the French state is importing the very playbook the U.S. perfected across its empire.

The United States built the technofascist model: a fully integrated structure where Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the Pentagon, and Big Media coordinate to suppress dissent and secure imperial flows. In that model, the war on terror becomes a war on thought, and civil liberties are overwritten by counterinsurgency doctrine. France, under the mounting pressure of imperial crisis and demographic rebellion, is mimicking this architecture — banning activist groups, silencing Palestine solidarity, and surveilling its captive colonial population under the guise of “public order.”

France’s actions are not sovereign innovation — they are the reactive recalibrations of a junior imperial partner. Since the post–World War II order was secured under U.S. hegemony, France has served as a subordinate node in the imperial system — economically tethered, militarily aligned, and ideologically disciplined. Now, with Trump 2.0 accelerating the breakdown of the trilateral imperialist bloc, Paris is scrambling to assert stability through repression — even if that means importing U.S.-style technofascist governance. The “war on extremism” in France is simply a localized expression of the same global war on resistance, managed by empire’s decaying core.

It’s no accident that many of the groups France is targeting — pro-Palestinian coalitions, anti-imperialist student unions, anti-fascist alliances — are modeled on or inspired by movements across the Global South. The captive colonies inside France — North and West African migrants, Muslim proletarians, second- and third-generation youth from Algeria, Senegal, Mali — are not being radicalized by ideology, but by reality: police occupation, mass unemployment, racist media, and the permanent war against their peoples. And their response — solidarity, resistance, clarity — is precisely what terrifies the French ruling class.

Because what the technofascist system fears most is not violence — it’s revolutionary coordination. Not just protest, but convergence. The realization that the struggle in the banlieue is not separate from the intifada in Gaza, from the uprising in Haiti, from the shutdowns in Chile. France may pretend to act alone, but it’s simply rehearsing the next act of a dying empire — one that was written in Washington, trained by Langley, and enforced from Ferguson to Fallujah.

IV. From Banlieue to Barrio: Organizing Against Empire’s Thought Police

The French state is not simply banning groups — it is criminalizing history. It wants the people of the banlieues to forget that the FLN once drove out French colonizers with rifles and organization. It wants the descendants of enslaved Africans in the Antilles to forget that their ancestors rose up against Napoleon. It wants Arab youth to forget that intifada means uprising. But the memory remains — not in textbooks, but in chants, in murals, in WhatsApp groups, in clenched fists behind barricades. That is what France fears. And that’s why solidarity must go beyond slogans — it must become action.

The repression of anti-colonial organizing in France is not unique. In 2023 the African Peoples Socialist Party was attacked for opposing U.S. imperialism and building solidarity with Russia and African liberation movements. This attack on APSP was a direct strike against the legacy of Black Power, internationalism, and self-determination. It was the prototype for the very bans now unfolding in France. These are not isolated attacks — they are coordinated strategies of counterinsurgency by imperial powers threatened by the global convergence of the colonized.

And yet, resistance persists. From the Yellow Vests in France to the 2020 uprisings in the U.S., from Palestinian-led mobilizations across Europe to solidarity caravans linking Marseille to Gaza, the people are not waiting for permission. Even within the imperial core, material acts of solidarity have erupted — the 2019 occupation of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C. by CodePink and other activists; street blockades against Israeli weapons manufacturers in the U.K.; student encampments across the U.S. demanding divestment from genocide. These are not symbolic — they are insurgent memories made material.

So what do we do now? We study. We organize. We connect the struggle of France’s working class and captive colonies to those of Atlanta, Oakland, and Chicago. We uplift the movements that empire tries to silence — APSP, the Palestinian youth coalitions, the undocumented workers unions, the antifascist networks under siege. And we act. We blockade ports. We disrupt weapons transfers. We defend targeted comrades. We expose collaborators. We build dual power in our neighborhoods and solidarity networks across borders. Because empire is coordinated — and so too must our resistance be.

France is not banning these groups because they are weak. It is banning them because they carry the potential to awaken a sleeping giant: a global, organized, revolutionary movement of the oppressed. Let them tremble.