Joanna
Colin Brace wrote:
>http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-protest/wall_bulldozer_3421.jsp
>
>Wall and Bulldozer
>John Berger
>5 - 4 - 2006
>
>Last night I watched the president address the nation. Earlier in the
>week 3 million people - mostly students - were demonstrating in the
>streets against the new law which allows firms to take on and then
>sack young workers indiscriminately. Various commentators compared the
>extent of the protests - and of the public sympathy with the
>protesters - to the situation in France in 1968. Here I'm not
>discussing this historical comparison. I simply want to describe the
>style of President Chirac's address, for it was in many ways typical
>of how political leaders - at least in the First World - now address
>their people.
>
>He was well rehearsed and sure of himself, yet he gave the impression
>of already knowing that his intervention would change nothing. All he
>could do was to make the best of a bad job. He was neither reassuring
>nor anxious. Time, fatigue and the Forces of Order would, he assumed,
>finally settle the affair.
>
>In the past political leaders, when addressing the nation, proposed
>construction. They might exaggerate, minimise the price to be paid, or
>simply lie; their projects could be as different from one another as
>the Third Reich, the United States of America or a Socialist Republic.
>Their propositions nevertheless evoked the realisation of some vision,
>or the creation of a society which did not yet exist. Construction.
>
>Under other circumstances in the past, political leaders proposed the
>active defence of already existing institutions and practices, more or
>less respected by those they were addressing, and now considered to be
>threatened and in danger. Such propositions often led to chauvinism,
>racism and witch-hunting. Yet their rhetoric encouraged and made real,
>however briefly, a widespread and lived sense of shared loyalties,
>during the saving of something.
>
>The rhetoric of today's political leaders serves neither construction
>nor conservation. Its aim is to dismantle. Dismantle what has been
>inherited from the past, socially, economically and ethically, and, in
>particular, all the associations, regulations and mechanisms
>expressing solidarity.
>
>The End of History, which is the Corporate global slogan, is not a
>prophecy, but an order to wipe out the past and what it has bequeathed
>everywhere. The market requires every consumer and employee to be
>massively alone in the present.
>
>No electorate is yet prepared to accept such a dismantling. And for a
>simple reason. The act of voting, however manipulated or free the
>election, is a way of assembling memories in support of a proposed
>future programme. We touch here the profound contradiction between the
>tyranny of the world market and democracy, between so-called consumer
>choice and citizens' rights.
>
>The new law in question, which increases the précarité
>(precariousness) of employment for those who have finished their
>studies, was officially presented as a measure, in the short term, for
>diminishing unemployment.
>
>The existing damage has to be officially admitted, but its causes and
>its long-term consequences need to be obfuscated and mystified.
>(Otherwise more discontent, revolts, anger, violence.)
>
>Instead of admitting the existence of the bulldozer which is the
>modernising machine of today's economic market tyranny, unemployment
>is referred to as if it were an epidemic or a plague. A fléau
>(scourge), the president called it.
>
>Consequently the process of dismantling has to be disguised and
>hidden. And today this is political leaders' first task. Their own
>role of course is also being dismantled. But they have already chosen
>to exercise, enjoy and exploit their albeit diminished powers, rather
>than confront any global truth. It is this which explains their
>pragmatism combined with their staggering lack of realism. As also
>their unprecedented shiftiness as politicians. Their task is to
>prevaricate whilst the broker's deal is arranged elsewhere.
>
>Return now to the typical address of political leaders in the times
>we're living. Whenever they face contestation, they have to hide what
>is happening by swiftly erecting a wall of opaque words. The
>conclusion of Jacques Chirac's address was a perfect example: instead
>of challenging the false concept of modernisation, its brutal
>dismantling is referred to as if it were some chapter in natural
>science. "The world of work", as the president announced, "in
>perpetual evolution....."
>
>Such speeches reveal how the political leaders making them have in
>fact abdicated from politics. Politics are their pretence. And
>although they are addressing multitudes (20 million in Chirac's case)
>we should also note how solitary and therefore absurd their public
>arguments have become.
>
>En République, quand il s'agit de l'interet national, il ne saurait y
>avoir ni vainqueur, ni vaincu. Nous devons maintenant nous rassembler.
>Et chacun à sa place doit agir en responsabilité. ("In the Republic,
>when it concerns the national interest, one mustn't think in terms of
>winners and losers. Let us now all come together. And let each one on
>his own act with responsibility.")
>
>A verbal wall to hide what is happening. And on the other side of the
>wall the bulldozer continues to dismantle.
>
>Nonetheless, wall or not, everyone except the rich or those with a
>good chance of becoming rich, is aware of the dismantling. Hence the 3
>million on the streets. Hence the major national worry about
>unemployment, about the ever-present risk of unemployment and the
>increasing workload imposed upon the employed.
>
>--
> Colin Brace
> Amsterdam
>
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