Olivier Babeau is president of the Sapiens Institute and professor of management sciences at the University of Bordeaux. He recently published
The New Digital Disorder: How Digital is Exploding Inequalities
(Buchet Chastel, 2020).
The image is distressing: an entire train stopped in the middle of the track, its ripped sides spilling 1,500 tons of grain onto the ballast.
The activists who blocked the way in the name of the fight against "agribusiness" thought they were stopping a soy train.
In reality, they caused the loss of wheat intended to feed poultry.
Beyond the stupidity of an action demonstrating a singular ignorance and the waste of a cereal whose course is at its highest, it is the deep meaning of these actions of these groups that should worry.
The blunder of these representatives of the sadly known organization Extinction Rebellion only prolongs the very numerous actions which, like those of the "voluntary reapers", claim to do justice.
In reality, these are real rampages that are perpetrated, destroying the work of our agriculture.
Property rights are trampled underfoot along with crops.
Specialists in living room agriculture and fed to an above-ground sectarian ideology, these activists know that they can count on the leniency of justice.
It is time to realize the seriousness of these actions, the effect of which far exceeds the losses recorded at the time.
Adorned with the tinsel of just anger, these well-fed bourgeois playing revolutionaries do infinite harm to a democracy of which they claim to be the ultimate expression.
Olivier Babau
What is the rationality of these activist “happenings”?
Representing only an infinitesimal part of the electorate, these small groups seek to circumvent the system of democratic representation by skillfully exploiting the biases of our media system.
A handful of determined people can stage a protest that will be magnified by the magic of the cameras.
Insignificance becomes event.
A few individuals pass themselves off as “a movement”.
Righteous and simplistic rhetoric equating business and industry with absolute Evil, and a fantasized pseudo-nature with Good, does the rest.
Adorned with the tinsel of just anger, these well-fed bourgeois playing revolutionaries do infinite harm to a democracy of which they claim to be the ultimate expression.
Because the tragedy is that these techniques systematically used by these active minorities work: accompanied by constantly repeated lies, they have notably succeeded, over the years, in instilling in public opinion distrust of nuclear power, GMOs and agricultural innovations. in general.
If we have delayed so long in launching the nuclear program that our sovereignty and the energy transition need, if we have allowed our agriculture to lose its leading position, it is to such abuses that we owe it.
Read alsoOlivier Babeau: “French farmers are pillars of the ecological transition”
Misinformation, violence and dictatorship of a few minorities guided by their anti-systemic designs are the realities that we should end up seeing behind these actions.
In truth, they do not offer solutions, denounce at the wrong time and set back the democratic debate much more than they promote it.
Substituting slogans for arguments, preferring ideological anathema to lucid confrontation with the facts, these groups of activists take advantage of the weakness of a public debate which struggles to develop in-depth exchanges on many essential subjects.
At a time when food shortages threaten the world, when the geopolitical context calls for reactions in defense of our sovereignty and when environmental challenges require constructive mobilization,
