Re: maybe a couple of reasons

Well, I am sorry to get on your nerves, but I fear that I am going to have to get on your nerves even more by asking: when have I ever maintained, let alone "insisted", that America "invented imperialism"? Please link to the post where I insisted on that point. I certainly don't recall making any such insistence. I am not unaware of Britain's history. I am not a fan of the British empire, which was primarily about wealth extraction, as all European empires were. And it has left a destructive legacy in its wake (though I am not going to take on some weird sense of personal guilt for what my country did decades before I was born. No more would I blame you personally for the present actions of the U.S. state.). But Britain now does not have nearly the significance in the world system as the U.S. Mostly, it is a satellite of the U.S. I certainly blame the current rulers of Britain for being content that my country should be a satellite, and I wish that my country would adopt a different policy; I also blame the current rulers for their support for ongoing imperialism, for example, by selling weapons to the Israelis. Nevertheless, the U.S. has vastly more power in the world system than Britain, and, since Suez, Britain has found it difficult to enact any foreign or military policy displeasing to the Americans (that is why I tend to think that, for all the EU's inadequacies, Britain must rejoin the EU). Concerning the differences between the political situation in Britain and in France, kit's post says everything much more eloquently than I could. The point I was making about Polanski and student protests was not about the distinction between confrontations and violence (which I accept, and I may have expressed myself ineptly in my prior post); it was that the Greens are not associated in Britain with confrontations with the police, whereas LFI seems to have become associated with confrontations, which could damage their chances if the middle class blame the LFI for the property damage and injuries that have resulted. But I am not in France, and I have always said that you can't really understand the politics of a country unless one has lived there for decades, so maybe I shouldn't say anything at all. I don't agree that stating that Zionism is racism (since it requires the dehumanisation of the displaced population as part of its rhetoric) is the same as "blaming Jews". Zionism is a political ideology; Jewishness (in this context) is an ethnicity. Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews. I don't blame any European Jew before the middle of the last century for feeling that European antisemitism was intolerable and wanting to move to Palestine. But there is a difference between wanting safety in another land, and wanting to cleanse that land of its inhabitants. I don't agree that those Jews who moved to Palestine were compelled, by the British empire, or anything else, to adopt a policy of pushing out Palestinians en masse or setting up an ethnostate. I do not accept that the Israelis were compelled to enact the Nakba, any more than the current ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is a policy that Israel is somehow compelled to adopt. It is characteristic of the oppressing group that they represent themselves as the victims, blame other actors for their own actions, and excuse present atrocities by reference to past horrors, and that is exactly what the Israelis have done and are doing. Concerning the choice of electoral politics versus direct action, the latter has a legitimate place; but the state is not going to go away just because we ignore it, and modern states are vastly powerful. The battle must be on the terrain of actual power, and in our societies, that power, ultimately, requires electoral success. Yes, direct action has a role as well (e.g. Palestine Action), but in the end the aim of this (beyond the immediate one of disrupting a weapons supply chain, for example, in the case of PA) is to get elected governments to change course. How else do you think that things can be changed? I have not seen The French Dispatch.