Usually, people on the Left are much more circumspect about their indifference to the real-world pain their plans and tactics inflict on ordinary people.
They're not unaware, though many of their more naive supporters are, since they have the reasoning ability and attention spans of gnats. The "vanguard of the proletariat" knows exactly what they are doing, and they see the costs imposed on others as a necessary step on the path to the nirvana they always promise but never deliver.
When Hasan Piker dismisses the tens of millions of dead and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution as "excesses," he means exactly what he is saying: the price paid to create communist China was more than worth it in his eyes.
It's no accident that one of the popular left-wing online magazines in the United States is named after the French revolutionary Jacobins. Revolutionary terror is a feature, not a bug.
🚨📹 IDENTIFICATION: She described the rape threat made by rioters against a mother accompanied by her infant as "collateral damage." In the same video filmed at Place de la République by @brutofficiel, she calls for revolution and revels in the violence and destruction in Paris.
This woman is named Bettina Zourli. An LFI activist and pro-Palestinian 🇵🇸, she is also a sociology professor at @UnivRennes_2.
So should we be surprised that a lecturer at the University of Rennes would tell a woman that her rape by migrants who tried to break into her apartment would just be "collateral damage" in the people's struggle to eliminate the capitalist oppressor system? After all, her apartment is a product of a system that has private property, and the lock on her door is an affront to socialism.
France's 21News caught the exchange. Here is a translation of their story:
A mother says she was threatened with rape while protecting her newborn and trying to stop the looting of a shop. Facing her, Bettina Zourli, a sociology teacher at Rennes 2, defends revolutionary violence and speaks of "collateral damage." The confrontation, filmed by Brut, raises serious questions.
A young mother says she had to barricade herself with her newborn to escape men who were threatening to rape her. Facing her, a woman talks about private property, neoliberalism and revolution. Moments later, the woman uses an expression that outrages the mother: "It's collateral damage." The scene took place at Place de la République in Paris, the day after the violence of Oct. 17. Filmed by Brut, it pits a woman who says she was directly confronted by rioters against Bettina Zourli, an author and sociology teacher at Rennes 2 University. Beside them, a street sweeper steps in to voice his exasperation at the destruction.
What could have been just an exchange about protests getting out of hand takes on a whole other dimension when testimony about a rape threat runs into a speech defending the necessity of revolutionary violence.
"They said they were going to rape me because I was a dirty bourgeoise"
It starts with a political explanation of the violence. A young man in the clip calls it "the reflection of the violence of the state and of neoliberalism."
Bettina Zourli then weighs in on the property damage: "But it's private property, it doesn't matter! It doesn't matter!"
The young mother reacts immediately: "It doesn't matter? I was with my newborn. I was with my newborn, I was in an apartment, they were trying to get in because they said they were going to rape me because I was a dirty bourgeoise, because I was stopping them from looting the little shop downstairs."
That, my friends, is how the Left thinks, straight from a college professor. The university responded by disavowing the sentiment but classifying the matter as a matter of academic freedom.
OK. Would they have said the same thing if a professor had suggested that beating up rioters was a good idea? Probably not, I would wager.
t's in this exchange that Bettina Zourli says the words: "It's collateral damage." "Oh! Great!" the mother shoots back, visibly outraged.
What that phrase means is at the heart of the controversy. In a conversation where rape threats have just been mentioned, calling it "collateral damage" comes across as reducing serious violence to a side effect of a political fight.
"Revolution isn't calm"
The exchange doesn't stop there. Bettina Zourli lays out her view of activism. "Pacifist activism doesn't work," she says, before invoking Nelson Mandela and his turn to armed struggle against apartheid.
The young mother cuts in: "Oh, OK, thank you for clarifying, you're not a pacifist." Then she goes back to what she says she lived through: "Yesterday I was barricaded in with my newborn, with guys threatening to rape me. You're justifying that violence."
Bettina Zourli replies: "No, not at all." That denial matters: the instructor explicitly rejects the idea that she is justifying the rape threats. But what she says next keeps the confrontation going over the place of violence in the revolution she hopes for.
"But it's normal! Revolution isn't calm! It doesn't happen calmly. But I'm for the revolution, obviously yes, of course!"
This is exactly the logic of the Jacobin crowd, the Hasan Piker crowd, and altogether too many of the Left in the West today. The people who admire Castro, Guevara, Mao, Lenin, and the French Revolutionaries.
Unfortunately, too few "centrists" take any of this seriously, and when forced to take a side, they often side with the rioters, as we saw in Minnesota last winter, during the BLM riots, the "Summer of Love," and all the other "protests" that Left people dead, injured, and city blocks burned.
Just frame the rioters as "victims," and they get impunity.
A street sweeper cleans up the damage while they debate revolution
In the middle of the confrontation, a third person steps in. He says less, but he shows another side of the riots. "We're sick of all this, look!" says a street sweeper who is helping clean up. Later he explains: "We're helping the lady, we're here to help, to clear things away."
His plain words stand in contrast to the jargon-heavy ideological vocabulary that dominates the rest of the exchange. He offers no theory about neoliberalism or the need for revolution. He just talks about the cleanup work and the help given to the people there.
A feminist against sexual violence, but ready to accept the "collateral damage" of revolution?
The paradox is striking. Bettina Zourli, who devotes part of her work to denouncing sexual violence and amplifying victims' voices, finds herself facing a woman describing being threatened with rape while holding her newborn.
But when that violence comes up in the middle of a debate about the revolution she champions, the vocabulary changes: now it's "collateral damage."
The "vanguard of the proletariat" speaks the language of protecting victims, but who they assign that category to is the tell. They don't care about ordinary folks like the street sweeper or the mom defending her children; they care about their ideological compadres and the migrants they seek to use as Brownshirts to keep people in their place.
I am convinced that the liberals who support the rioters take comfort in the idea that they are on the side of justice, and until the body count gets high enough, they just look the other way. When they finally get fed up, they clean up the mess and then memory-hole the damage as "collateral damage" in the pursuit of social justice.
We see the same pattern time and again. Seattle with CHAZ/CHOP, and now they have a socialist mayor. COVID fascism, which must be forgotten and forgiven. And the horrors of communism, which are now hidden behind a gauze of hazy memory. They are signing up for the same thing all over again, all in the name of social justice.
It's not that they WANT the violence; it's just that they sympathize with the cause, and until it impacts them directly, they look the other way.
It's infuriating. The leftists are a tiny minority, and it is only the tolerance of the "moderate liberals" that gives them power. We warn them time and again, and for our troubles we get called fascists.
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2026/10/20/the-leftist-response-to-women-concerned-about-migrant-abuse-collateral-damage-n3820104?utm_source=pjmediambvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm
