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| Minotaur, gypsum sculpture by Emil Alzamora (2006) (pict source) |
If you are in your forties like I, you will have enough scope to be able to draw up a rough comparative study between what you remember from your childhood years in terms of societal environment and the way society has turned out to be. Your elders will probably have brought enough food for thought to you through observations of their own. Compared to my early experience of it, I do not recognise the West - and this I say without exaggerating.
I had noticed a shift (although I couldn't formulate it at the time) as far as the early 1980s, when disindustrialisation became prominent, and the textile, steel and coal industries were blitzed out of existence from their production centres. I witnessed it first hand in my French northern textile hometown of Saint-Quentin. And it became increasingly apparent that political figures all the way up to the President had been complicit in the demise and let those production towns down like a bad memory: they saw them as an embarrassment. We were silenced, urged to get used to it sooner rather than later, there was no turning back. And when I say let down, I mean a total collapse of the local economy and high unemployment rates (20%+) as a direct consequence, that shot up almost overnight. The powers-that-be coined a word, a magic word, that would explain it all and reassure us, and most importantly which we could blame for all our misfortunes: 'recession', the new normal.
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| Model: Cloud, sculpture by Maggie Casey (2006) |
Oh, the governmental bureaucrats, business analysts, poncey economists, know-it-all journalists - and even your own boss or auntie Céleste after hearing their lecturing speech on the telly - wouldn't leave it at that. They shifted the goalpost. They pointed the finger at the unemployed and the soon-to-bes. Those were the culprits! They were criticised for having been too greedy, for demanding less working hours, better working conditions and higher standards of living. Can you believe that it was ultimately their fault if the factory had to close down altogether or relocate its operations to the Far East?! They had to pay the price and fellow countrymen became divided over the hot topic. And the bureaucrats nailed their despise for the Labour Force further by accusing the French of shunning factory work like it was beneath them. That only foreign, emigrant workforce were willing to work on the assembly lines now. Another fallacy and a sure dividing point that would fracture further the nation.
Rule of Thumb No.1: Divide and conquer.
if you seek to rule, create division and chaos.
During the 'recession', swathes of working- and middle-class took a hit and lost their jobs before they could even save for a rainy day. Those who yesterday (i.e. after WWII) had rebuilt the country up now found themselves in forced redundancy. They became redundant from work and from life. They were forced to exchange their usefulness, their skills, their craft, their trade, their experience, their diligence, their dedication, their pride, for a cheque from the government. Forced to leave their neat little semi-detached whose mortgage they could afford no more for the 'joys' of subsidised housing, stacked up like unwanted goods on shelves. They had become unwanted goods. Now they had to learn to become invisible.
Public-private partnership agencies mushroomed out of the woodwork. Those were supposed to come to the rescue of the unemployed. All they did was skewer the job statistics by shunting them from one category to another, through retraining schemes more akin to a brainwashing session to realign their psyches so they became acceptant of their fate, and live by on governmental aid and be thankful for it. The industrial West was becoming a thing of the past. The skilled guipure operative was urged to retrain as a supermarket shelf stacker. And her husband, formerly a steelworker, to do part-time pizza delivery. That's where the demand was at.
In my life journey, I have come across much wasted talent, countless wasted lives, lives that could have accomplished but whose talents were stunted out of existence or side-tracked. Graduates like I who didn't want to end up on the dole had to export themselves overseas for work and not be choosy. Is this the way for a nation to operate? Waste its homegrown talent away or force it out of its borders?
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| Encyclopédie de la Vitesse, Editions Hachette (1956) |
In the Western society model, strong precepts had prevailed until the 1960s/ 1970s. In France we had a glorious moniker for it: les Trente Glorieuses, three decades of full employment and buoyant economic activity (approx. 1945-1975), boosted by the aftermath of WWII (reconstruction) and the move into the consumer-centric technology-savvy model, a boon!
This was held together by an unshakable moral, socio-economic code of conduct. Back then, our society structure would put strong emphasis upon the Nation State: civil rights and civil duties, undefected pride in one's nation. Patriotism was embraced unconditionally, not derided.
No knees were taken when the national anthem played:
you stood up and honored the fallen and the living
under one flag!
Respect for Law and Order was tantamount to a functioning society, where the State ensured the protection of its people and the people paid their respect through national identity and pride, and served their Nation when national security was threatened (war). Rights and obligations of the people towards their Nation and of the Nation towards its people, a strong economy and buoyant industry sector, with wares manufactured locally/ nationally. All of these concepts, still prevalent in the 1960s, incrementally deliquesced to the point that they have now been turned on their heads.
Family and religion were still strong in the 1960s/ 1970s but the communist, marxist, trotskyist, socialist, atheist, feminist and other activist movements did not help the cause; if anything, they fragilised it. In fact, neither do they unify nor pacify: they instead harbour division and disfunction. Bingo, all that the elites want!
As we are getting more enlightened to what really is happening to us and refute the mainstream media's fabricated truths, we come to the realisation that the economic decline of the West as we view it today had been orchestrated all along. And some of the evidence points out as far back as 1969 with Dr Richard L. Day's infamous speech. His 'predictions' turned out to be accurate.
