NOTICING WHAT' LEFT OUT HELPS US GRASP HOW WE'RE CONTROLLED
Click back to how all aspects of society reinforce the ruling class. Then consider ads, especially those that hover over great cities, promoting a mentality that goes far beyond consumerism.
Richard Nahem, Eye Prefer Paris; no date, but huge ads first appeared in 2011.
Union Square in southern Manhattan, 2025 / Elisabeth Rawson
They promote irrationality...
Isolation...
 |
| At the top of the Hotel Lutetia in Paris's elegant 7th district, 2015 |
In a world that is a void.
Other kinds of mass communication join in eliminating most of what fills that void. That is the reason why in Paris, tourism, schoolbooks and museums, suppress everything except an elitist view of the past.
Which is being erased too:
The 19th-century Opéra, considered the most important building of the mid-19th century.
# # #
That may be changing.
For the 2024 Olympics the Socialist City Hall of Saint-Denis, a working-class town north of Paris, extended the metro line from the Orly international airport in the south to its sports stadium. To receive the crowds for that time and for the future it built an immense stop, where rails connect with lines that reach throughout the city.
On the ground-floor level a mural covers a third of the extremely long wall. It celebrates the struggle that led to establishing the eight-hour day a century ago...
Dark colors evoke the struggle that forced the change...
Bright ones celebrate a victory that improves the lives of people now.
That change in mass communication coincides with struggles breaking out world-wide, whose underlying connection is the destruction globalized capitalism brings:
American resistance to the lawless deportation of black and brown immigrants by the Trump regime, summer 2025.
By pointing out a control
of which we are usually unaware,
these blooks join that fight.
Harald Wolff
* * *
End of the blooks.
I'd like to know what you think of them.
If you find their ideas useful
please pass them on.
The images stress emotion not reason, which hampers critical thought and can encourage dictators and glamorize aloneness. Irrational people for whom buying briefly lessens loneliness make excellent consumers -- and are relatively easy to control. So all that defies the void is suppressed.
Two matters in particular vanish: an economic view of the past that shows how all aspects of a society reinforce the ruling class, and whatever shows everyday people acting together to make change, as opposed to being told what to do.
Take eliminating Marie-Antoinette's cell, camouflaging the medieval rampart of the Louvre and the vast space that reveals the Opéra's original goal or having most of its facade hidden by an ad (all changes since in 2017).
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