More Thoughts on the French Demonstrations
|
Henry See
Signs of the Times
April 18, 2006
|
With each day, more and more people living in the western democracies are awakening to the fact that their politicians and civil servants do not represent the real interests of the ordinary citizen, if so broad a generalisation may be permitted. In the photos taken in the halls of power, we see row after row of white men in suits. In the US, minorities are sorely underrepresented, and women, well, it is a joke to think women have made any progress. In France, the "leaders" are groomed in a series of elite schools where they learn the ropes and earn the privilege of addressing each other with the familiar "tu". In the US, the mere admittance into an Ivy league school, regardless of your academic achievements, assures the power-hungry are part of the club. The situation is the same no matter where you look.
Around the kitchen tables of these countries, people are asking "Are there any good politicians?". Without an overview of the situation, they think that things must be better in some other country. But you, the reader of these pages, know that the same situation exists everywhere. Democracy is just another label given to rule by an elite, where explicit shows of force have been superceded by a socially imposed order that is in the mind of the enslaved, a hypnotic trance of sorts that permits them to perceive the iron weight of their chains as the fruits of their credit cards.
They ask, "Who speaks for me?"
The millions of people who took to the streets recently in France to protest the new law changing hiring policy know this. They know that they have no voice in the eschelons of power. They know that the only means of being heard is to take to the streets in peaceful demonstations and to continue to press until changes are won.
What other choice do they have?
In May 2005, in spite of an orchestrated campaign in the French media and descriptions of the horrors that would befall France and all of Europe if the neo-liberal European constitution was defeated, France voted at almost 55% against it. The sky still has not fallen.
The attacks by the forces of capitalist globalisation have been proceeding for years. The propaganda campaign about the "inevitability" of global markets, the need of "deregulation" so that money can go where it wants, when it wants, with no impediments, picked up in earnest in the 1970s. Thatcher's Britain was the first casualty, although British miners fought the Iron Lady hard. At the same time in the United States, Reagan broke what little remained of the backs of long-compromised unions. In Canada, the media mouthpieces for unbridled capitalism softened the public over a period of ten years to prepare the conditions for the mid-nineties strike at Canada's social net. The excuse was the supposedly monstrous government debt, a debt we were told would take ten or more years to pay off. After the cuts in social services, the government's budget was back to a surplus in one and one-half years. The surplus was not used to rebuild the serices that had been slashed; it was siphoned off to business.
The result of this war on social services has been the stripping by the state of those services that aimed at shielding the poorer members from the attacks of the wealthy and the selling off of profitable sectors so that the profis would, again, go to a limited few.
In most of these countries, the battle was won without a fight. People had been convinced by the disinformation that these were hard, but necessary, choices, and there was no other way out.
In France, the neo-liberal discourse is not accepted as a fact; it is seen as an Anglo-Saxon assault on French values. The brainwashing that has been so successful elsewhere has not yet taken hold. When French workers and students are told that they must accept these changes in order to "modernize" the French economy, they want to know why. When they see that these "modernizations" are for the profit of only a few, they are unwilling to accept them, to do what other peoples have done and roll over give up.
In the United States, most people yawn and go back to sleep. It is not surprising, then, that the situation in the United States is many times worse than the situation in France, as Dave McGowan pointed out so powerfully in the editorial we recently ran.
The population of the US is five times that of France. If the French can take to the streets in the millions, how many could be in the streets of Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, L.A., and the other US cities if people fed up with the lies and crimes of the Bush administration, the desecration of the Constitution, and the slow but steady erosion of rights and economic security, were to turn out in comparable numbers? Five million? Ten million?
But we have grave doubts that such an event will occur, and because it hasn't occurred, not since the heyday of the movement against the war in Vietnam, US citizens are in the dire position of losing everything. In his book Political Ponerology, Andrew Lobaczewski writes about the pathocracy:
Thus, the biological, psychological, moral, and economic destruction of the majority of normal people becomes, for the pathocrats, a "biological" necessity. Many means serve this end, starting with concentration camps and including warfare with an obstinate, well-armed foe who will devastate and debilitate the human power thrown at him, namely the very power jeopardizing pathocrats rule: the sons of normal man sent out to fight for an illusionary "noble cause." Once safely dead, the soldiers will then be decreed heroes to be revered in paeans, useful for raising a new generation faithful to the pathocracy and ever willing to go to their deaths to protect it.
And this is indeed the future awaiting the United States, make no mistake about it. Its youth are already being shipped off to foreign wars to die "defending" nothing, not freedom, not democracy, not liberty. No, they are dying while trying to impose the pathocracy's hold over the Middle East and to annihilate the Islamic world.
The workers and students in France who took to the streets have shown that if we have no say in the places of power, we can raise our voices and make them heard. If policitians won't defend our interests, then we must do so ourselves, and, this, whether or not we think we can affect any change. The standing up for our rights and the defence of our lives in the face of the pathocracy is in itself a worthy cause. More than that, it is right and necessary; it is an unshakeable refusal to believe their lies. It lets them know that we don't buy into the illusory world as portrayed in their media. They don't believe it, why should we? They consider the ordinary citizen to be beneath contempt because he or she is so often willing to let them do the thinking "for us" rather than doing it for ourselves. Worse, until we take a stand and refuse their lies, we are unworthy, unworthy of our role as respresentatives of the creative force. To sit and take whatever they serve is to turn our backs on an unwritten and open future, on our power to give birth to something new and never before seen.
If the pathocrats fear anything, they fear this creative power into which the majority of normal people can tap, but which is out of touch to them.
We don't need to have a plan; we need nothing more than the next step. That step is to stand up and say "No!". That alone will unleash the creative force within us, and as long as we are guided by a need for the truth and remain sincerely open to passing through the unexpected and unforeseen door that will appear in response, we need not know more at the start. We must learn to allow the creative force to guide us and to create new opportunities where before there was only despair.
The caveat is that this can only happen socially if each of us are acting in this way in our individual lives.
While the above words may sound airy-fairy, especially to militants who have been active in the drive for social change for many years, I can only say, try to do it in your life. You'll see that it isn't so easy. Nor is it a call to "be in the present", as we hear from new age or Eastern philosophy. Living in the present can be nothing more than self-gratification of one loses sight of the future, that is, of the results and responsibility of one's actions.
The edifice of pathocracy cannot survive without the creative input of those it subjugates. When that energy is withdrawn, it will collapse. However, the pathocrats, backed into a corner by their own wishful thinking, their belief that they can create a sustainable world in their image, will not go peacefully. They are willing to rain down the flames of the Apocalpyse to preserve their rule. We cannot yet know what the appropriate response will be at that time. We have not yet arrived at their downfall. Until then, we can only refuse to play their games, to believe their lies, to accept their leadership, to internalize their values, to die for their greed. On the positive side, we must reach out and build a network of sincere individuals to share the knowledge of psychopathy and their pathocratic states so that more and more people can be armed with the knowledge that can protect them from the conscienceless. We must exchange and discuss and deepen our understanding of the pathocratic structures of power and the means by which it hypnotizes and sways the unprepared. We must immunize ourselves from its influence.
This will take time, perhaps more time than we have. With each day, the United States is more and more entrapped in the dark cloud of obscurantism. Even if we see signs of revolt against the Bush Reich, we must not assume that the situation is improving, for who among those waiting in the wings of power will be willing to uncover all of its crimes? How many in the wings are willing to look the true facts of neocon and Israeli involvement in 9/11 in the face? How many are implicated themselves?
No, Bush and his partners in war crime could well be tossed aside and fed to the wolves on network TV without the underlying corruption and pathocratic power being changed one iota. If the needs of the pathocrats demand such a "sacrifice", it will be provided, served up hot even on Fox News.
And millions of people in that sad country will be able to pat themselves on the back and say that, once again, the system worked.
Then, watch out.
|
|
![[Valid Atom 1.0]](/signs/images/valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom 1.0 feed")
