THE WAGES OF EMPIRE

Inglorious Empire: new book on the dubious legacy of Empire Building


The Wages of Empire

... and "the time of monsters"
​
Here's a movie that people actually watched and rated. Who are these people, and what are they using for brains?

IMDB: Love in the Time of Monsters (2014)

• Two sisters travel to a cheesy tourist trap where they battle toxic monsters dressed in bigfoot costumes in order to save the ones they love.

The above is a poorly constructed sentence that properly parsed says: "to save the [toxic monsters] they love". The movie has a "cheesy" rating, but it astounds me that it actually has a rating; that a large group of people watched and reviewed it -- unless gratuitous nudity and gross violence have become the main viewing requirement.

People need to remember that a lot of that stuff, once seen, can't be unseen.

Well, that was the first thing handed to me by Google when I searched for "The Time of Monsters".
The next thing was this:

ThePointHowever: The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

It's said to be a loose translation, commonly attributed to Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) whose words and life in the time of Mussolini deserve our attention even, and perhaps especially, in this modern age.

Apparently, Gramsci did actually say in a letter from prison:

• To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.

and

• History teaches, but it has no pupils.

I'm guessing he meant that history has no pupils because new generations are fed the lies of the old, and that's why school children can still sing their patriotic anthems and salute the appropriate flags and feel pride, instead of remorse, at their country's history, so that they attribute hard times to current events rather than long-past misdeeds.

With regard to the "monsters", Gramsci actually said:

• The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

He also wrote:

• My practicality consists in this: in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall … that is my strength, my only strength.

As for myself, I learned from my own daughter (where she first heard it I don't know): "The best revenge is to live well". A man named George Herbert is credited with the original statement: “Living well is the best revenge.”

Herbert is also responsible for a whole slew of other sayings, all good advice I'm sure. Who needs Jordan Peterson, eh?

In the context of yellow (French), green&red/orange? (Canadian) vests, one of Herbert's statements clangs at me:

• Half the world knows not how the other half lives.

Canadians may imagine they are supporting the "Yellow Vest" movement in France (HAVE I GONE COLOUR BLIND? The Canadian vests do not look yellow to me) but the separate histories of France and Canada are such that neither knows the true mentality of the other.

The nature of mass movements is such that there is never just one clear motive; rather a good deal of manipulative poking and prodding in certain desired directions, depending on which instigator (party, union, special interest group) has the strongest voice and/or motivation and comes up with the best slogans.

As far as I can make out, what it boils down to is unmitigated racism.

​George W. Bush pointed out who the "terrorisssssts" were (YouTube) and the duty of "every nation" to support America's fight against them. Consequently, right wingers saw permission to paint the whole of Islam with Bush's brush (when he isn't using it to paint himself as a good guy with sops to those he duped into helping him utterly demolish the lives of ordinary Iraqis (and warp their own lives/psyches in the process).

It was just a matter of time before Bush (and his close friends Obama/Clinton) would be Trumped and all doors would be slammed against anyone who didn't walk, talk and look like a good Christian Merkin. And now that Canada has seen too many gross American movies and ingested too much crass American comedy, certain sentiments (that strangely harken back to those of the great, now failed, British Empire) are oozing to the fore.

Any support for the Yellow Vesters of France belies the deeper motives of the average Canadian far-righter who doesn't even like the French province of Quebec. (Scroll down this page and you will not likely be convinced that Quebec, nor indeed many of the places listed, are actually onboard, but are mere place-settings.) It's about their perceived superiority of language, religion and above all race. The biggest noise seems to be coming from out West, from provinces that have long considered separation from Canada.

(There is a Quebec Facebook page set up, but it's had only 24 views since last Tuesday.)

In France, immigration is the enduring impetus sustaining what remains of the original Yellow Vesters. It was apparently okay in the past for France to invade, rape, dominate, shoot and torture to death the people of Algeria, and send in its own thugs to rule over them, just as the Brits (whose Queen many Canadians still see as their beloved sovereign -- or at least live for the latest palace gossip and intrigue) arrogantly imagined it was their right to rule and profit from India.

And neither the French people nor the British people (and certainly not the people of Canada) protested in the streets against any of that, nor worried about possible repercussions down the road -- or in biblical parlance, "The wages of sin".

But it's not God who has left the average French guy feeling impoverished and overrun by foreigners; nor is it Fate; it's probably simple cause and effect, and it's amazing that Europe and the West have gotten off (so far) so lightly, and that the people remain so blitheringly oblivious to their nations' own past deeds.

Clearly, our schools have done their job, teaching children to love their flag and their country right or wrong.  Propaganda takes care of the deeds while Justice patiently awaits its moment.

Telegraph(2001): Algeria rape baby awarded war pension

H-France.net (2012): The Dark Side: French Men Becoming Monsters in Algeria

IrishTimes (2017): Inglorious Empire: what the British did to India

•  Almost 60 per cent of Britons were proud of the British Empire and almost 50 per cent thought it had made the colonies better off

Telegraph(2018): France may have apologised for atrocities in Algeria, but the war still casts a long shadow

The powerful, and especially those they induce to do battle for them, live solely for their own moment, not wasting thought on what-ifs, on future, final, enduring outcomes ... when the pigeons come home to roost; when what has gone around has come around.

It was okay for France to literally rape Algeria and it was great that the French people lived well off the proceeds of that triumph, but nothing remotely like the opposite can be tolerated.

Sadly, even though "white" "Christian" people have brought all sorts of repercussions upon themselves over the ages, they persist in setting themselves up for more. They don't consider that ceasing to invade other people's countries for so-called humanitarian, regime-change (read profit) reasons, might result in no piper having to be paid; no vests needing to be worn -- or at least to be worn for the reasons overtly stated (wages, taxes, etc.) and not as a cover for unwillingness to accept the ultimate wages of arrogance and outright thievery.

More reading:

Culanth.org: Time of Monsters

• Angela Merkel’s now-infamous statement “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do this!”) was met with refusal, ridicule, and hate. Merkel first uttered these words on August 31, 2015 after speaking about the challenge of integrating Syrian refugees into the country.

Global Research: What Happens if France’s Yellow Vests Win?

• Right after I arrived, what shocked me the most was that while the Vietnamese people seemed to ‘forgive’ the USA, they had never forgiven the French colonialists.