French politicians are the cowards. The people have always been hard as nails.

Plus they are the gold standard for protests. Both in method and motivation.

US propaganda. The Italians used to be the stereotypical cowards until France refused to join the invasion of Iraq.

By whom? Uneducated americans? That's your answer

Its reverse psychology, works wonders

Because if this was America, people would be dead.

Seriously, I respect the French here... But this is why. Police and even many citizens are brutal in the US. I'm guessing other places that say these things about the French are the same.

It's just the short history of WWII. Even then, the people were still fighting. In the long history, IIRC, they are the nation with the highest percentage of victories in war, or at least of European nations. I do think it has a lot with the US trying to replace them as the top world power though, so they pushed the story that they surrendered really hard.

When the system is threatened police are always the same . One of the worst was g8 protest in italy in 2001

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/17/italy.g8

Stefan Bauer dared to answer back: when a German-speaking guard asked where he was from, he said he was from the European Union and he had the right to go where he wanted. He was hauled out, beaten, given a face full of pepper spray, stripped naked and put under a cold shower. His clothes were taken away and he was returned to the freezing cell wearing only a flimsy hospital gown.

Shivering on the cold marble floors of the cells, the detainees were given few or no blankets, kept awake by guards, given little or no food and denied their statutory right to make phone calls and see a lawyer. They could hear crying and screaming from other cells.

Men and women with dreadlocks had their hair roughly cut off to the scalp. Marco Bistacchia was taken to an office, stripped naked, made to get down on all fours and told to bark like a dog and to shout "Viva la polizia Italiana!" He was sobbing too much to obey. An unnamed officer told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that he had seen brother officers urinating on prisoners and beating them for refusing to sing Faccetta Nera, a Mussolini-era fascist song.

Ester Percivati, a young Turkish woman, recalled guards calling her a whore as she was marched to the toilet, where a woman officer forced her head down into the bowl and a male jeered "Nice arse! Would you like a truncheon up it?" Several women reported threats of rape, anal and vaginal.

Territory size, is my guess. Both Russia and the US have relatively compliant populations, but also huge tracts of land. That makes it harder for relatively small communities to have "ownership" of their political masters. When the guy at the top can literally be at the other side of a continent, you can't threaten him with the guillotine. This prevents a sense of community and shared responsibility from being developed, both for the people and their leaders.

You have to team up with strangers in a far off place and ask them to fight on your behalf - and there is little guarantee you can offer the same favor in return. Thus, the leadership is insulated from consequences. So long as they have freedom of movement, leaders are free to do as they wish.

There are many forms of power, and we must limit them for our leaders if we want our peoples to have a better future. Movement, money, breadth and depth of influence, all must be limited for those who lead.

possibly more accountability

I'd say guns make the difference. When there's a chance that someone in the mob might pull out a gun, police are going to shut that down much more brutally. And protesters know this brutality as well, so they don't let it come that far either...

American cops will happily blind or cripple you for life, and will never see any consequences for doing it. It happens so regularly that it’s considered expected, and the media doesn’t even bother to report on it. If you read that there was a large protest in America, you can just assume that the cops removed some eyes and limbs, and permanently damaged lungs with chemical agents.

nice deodorant, here hold this flaming pallet for me, while I pelt you with more stuff that's on fire

This stuff is worthy of !BrandNewSentence@lemmy.today

This profile, good grief

Remember when France deployed tanks and killed thousands of protestors in the 90s. No, because China did that.