In the grand, rotting theater of global geopolitics, there is nothing quite as predictable as a French intellectual stumbling into a fistfight they didn’t invite and couldn’t possibly understand. The latest act in this tragicomedy features a French journalist—one of those brave souls who believes a laminated press pass acts as a mystical shield against authoritarian whims—getting himself bundled into the back of a Turkish police van in Istanbul. He was one of ten people arrested during a protest against a Syrian government offensive targeting Kurdish fighters. It is a story so saturated with irony and futility that it almost makes me want to crack a smile, if I weren't so profoundly bored by the repetition of human error.

Let’s look at the players, shall we? On one side, we have the Turkish state, an entity that views 'press freedom' with the same warmth a cat views a vacuum cleaner. To the authorities in Istanbul, a journalist is merely a protester who hasn’t found a good rock to throw yet. On the other side, we have the protesters, fueled by the eternal, misguided hope that shouting in a street in Turkey will somehow halt the grinding machinery of a Syrian military offensive hundreds of miles away. It is the political equivalent of screaming at a hurricane and being shocked when you get wet. And in the middle, our French protagonist, likely surprised to find that the 'Universal Rights of Man' do not, in fact, apply when you are obstructing a sidewalk in a city that has seen more empires crumble than he has seen croissants.

According to the pro-Kurdish DEM party—who, let’s be honest, treat every arrest like a marketing opportunity for their particular brand of victimhood—the journalist was simply doing his job. His 'job,' of course, involves standing in the middle of a chaotic scrum, filming people being angry, and then selling that anger back to a comfortable European audience who can feel virtuous while sipping their morning espresso. It is a parasitic relationship: the journalist needs the conflict to justify his existence, and the conflict needs the journalist to pretend it has a purpose beyond mindless territorial gain. The fact that he was arrested alongside nine others is almost insulting to his Gallic ego; he wasn’t even the main event, just part of a bulk discount on civil liberties.

The Syrian offensive itself is just another chapter in the endless, bloody book of 'Who Owns This Dirt?' The Kurdish fighters, perennial pawns in everyone’s game, are being squeezed once again. It is a cycle of violence that has lasted longer than most modern nations, yet we are expected to act as if this particular protest in Istanbul is a turning point. It isn't. It is a ritual. The Kurds protest, the Turkish police practice their wrestling moves, the French government will eventually issue a mildly concerned statement that sounds like a sigh, and the Syrian government will continue doing whatever it is authoritarian regimes do when they have too many bullets and too little oversight.

What is truly exhausting is the performative nature of the whole affair. The journalist likely believes his arrest is a badge of honor, a story to be told at dinner parties in the 11th arrondissement to prove he 'was there.' The Turkish authorities get to flex their muscles for a domestic audience that craves the image of a strongman standing up to foreign meddlers. And the DEM party gets a headline. Everyone wins, except, of course, for the actual human beings being pulverized in Syria, whose suffering is the raw material for this entire industry of outrage.

We live in a world where 'bearing witness' has become a substitute for actually doing anything. This French journalist wasn't there to stop a war; he was there to capture the aesthetics of the struggle. Now that he’s been swept up in the very machinery he was trying to critique, we are supposed to be outraged at the violation of his 'rights.' But rights are a luxury of the stable and the bored. In the streets of Istanbul, the only right that matters is the right of the person with the heaviest boot to step on the person on the ground. To expect anything else is not just naive; it is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who has been paying attention for the last five thousand years. This isn't journalism; it's just another tourist getting a very expensive lesson in local customs.