VI. HISTORY, A POLITICAL TOOL

WHY SHOULD YOU READ ABOUT PARIS IF YOU HAVE NO PLAN TO GO THERE, OR ABOUT FRENCH OR AFRICAN HISTORY WHEN YOU HAVE OTHER THINGS TO DO ?

For Paris, think of omissions, particularly insurrections and immigrants' creativity. The political implications are obvious, and lead to thinking about what other societies leave out too.

For history, consider its connection with the mentality that ads promote, particularly those that hover like Big Brother over great cities:

           Richard Nahem, 2020

Over Paris.

     Union Square in Manhattan, 2025 / Elisabeth Rawson

Over New York.

They glamorize...

• Emotion: No logical reason is given for buying the brand, a mindlessness that discredits expertise and leads to accepting authority. Lists of historical facts divorced from tangible interests fit that choice.

At the Châtelet crossroad in central Paris, June 2022

• Isolation: Most figures are alone, without social ties. Erasing insurrections fits in.

Summit of the Hotel Lutetia in the elegant 7th arrondissement.

• Void. Empty backgrounds implies that the outside world is irrelevant. Omitting grass-roots creativity and showing a postcard version of Paris fits that absence, and recently the past itself is being suppressed:

The facade of the Opéra, a support for ads (since 2023).

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History when realistically presented shows how all elements of a society buttress the powerful, as when in Old Regime France humble people insulted each other with "Your father was a valet!." Since innumerable aspects of daily life buttressed hierarchy based on birth, belief in it was taken for granted.

Such a view of the past also explains the impact of economic change: The question "What gave you all that wealth? You took the trouble to be born" spread in the years before the French Revolution, when economic growth began to seriously defy the hereditary ruling class.

As now, when immense companies blow away what populations everywhere hold dear...

Harald Wolff

...and ordinary people unite to resist their power and seek better ways to live.

The struggle is between über-capitalism backed by far-right parties and democratic socialists providing solutions to the problems that face us all.

Robert Reich

Hiding economic change and who benefits from it comes from the right, emphasizing it from the left.*

 

*Personal memory: My classes in the intellectual history of modern Europe at Vassar College and in modern Russsian history in Harvard's Soviet Union program did not mention Marx or his materialism even once.

Beaming light on a manipulation to which we have been subjected since childhood is part of that fight. 

Harald Wolff

That is these blooks' main purpose.

If you find them useful,

please pass them on.

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