News from France that central banker puppet Emmanuel Macron has decreed the imposition of a vaccine passport across the country is more ambiguous than first appears.
There is no question that the measure represents a major escalation in the political repression which now prevails across the West. But it is also an extremely risky move.
France, already simmering on the edge of civil war, has little ability to impose this solution if tested, perhaps not even technically.
In the absence of genuine capacity, Macron, like his partners in the UK and elsewhere, is relying on manufacturing the illusion of a fait accompli. But nothing is certain in this life except death.
Reports that the French rushed to book appointments for the dangerous and questionably effective experimental vaccines, already linked to tens of thousands of deaths in Europe and the United States, should be treated with the same scepticism that must now be routinely applied to all regime pronouncements.
As with similar assertions and poll numbers in other countries, the story is designed to create the impression that resistance is futile.
There is no reason for believing this is the case.
In reality, the French anti-vaccine movement is entrenched, and the French population are amongst the best armed in Europe.
There is no obvious reason why Macron’s tough-guy routine should convince them to change their opinion, and no evident means available to Macron to control them should they choose to resist.
Widely shared footage from June of a man slapping Macron in the face supplies a good indication of the esteem in which he is held by his countrymen.
Until the global launch of the pseudo-pandemic last year his government was struggling to contain a populist revolt by the Gilets Jaunes through police brutality comparable to China’s actions in Hong Kong.
Those scars have not faded. Meanwhile, the control of the French state over the banlieues is increasingly tenuous, with church burnings and vehicle arson now at the point where, for several months now, French generals have been warning of a civil war and the possibility of military intervention.
Does Macron, gimp of bankers, and not even the sharpest bankers, run the army?
Clawing for tools of repression, he has already exempted the increasingly lawless French police from mandatory vaccinations.
Les flics obligingly responded by teargassing the French people on Wednesday’s Bastille Day.
What will happen once these men realise that Macron and his employers need them more than the reverse?
In the manufactured shock which has accompanied its implementation, the extreme, perhaps insane, ambition of what is being attempted in the West has been overlooked.
In truth, beneath the breath of the bluff, the leaders of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.