THESE PAGES HAVE SHOWN THE BIASED PRESENTATION OF PARIS AND ITS PAST. WHAT EXPLAINS IT?
Long before AI, globalized capitalism was blowing away the most sacred beliefs, most cherished professions, deepest social ties, all that we hold dear...
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...replacing them with consumerism:
The Châtelet crossroad in central Paris
The ads that now hover over great cities...*
*Ads in other contexts can differ in detail.
Richard Nahem
Paris, noticed in 2011
Union Square in Manhattan / Elisabeth Rawson
- Obedience: The message is an order. History that stresses "great individuals" fits that authoritarianism.
- Passivity: Happiness comes from buying a brand.
- The outside world is of no concern: The background is empty, like incomprehensible history.
- Isolation: The figures are alone. The collective action that can successfully oppose the elites is unthinkable.
- Interchangeable consumers : The models are young, happy and middle class, a sameness that corresponds to the insipidity of the town as we are told it.
Contradictions to that mentality vanish, including the past itself.
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We know that for primal societies, cults and gangs all aspects of life coincide and reinforce each other.
The same is true for history: Think of how under the Old Regime hierarchy by birth was reinforced in so many ways that an insult among the humble was "Your father was a valet."
Mentalities changed when the economy did. "What gave you all that wealth? You took the trouble to be born," was the key line of a play to which Parisians flocked a few years before the Revolution, when capitalism had became impossible to contain.
Is something comparable happening now? Check the huge number of protests Global Protest Tracker. Granted, some are reactionary because anti-immigrant, the humble falling for the masters' blaming the most vulnerable for disasters their endless greed has brought.
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In Paris, recent changes suggest an evolution. This mural made in 2024, which covers a third of a métro platform, defies social conflict's usual deletion...
Saint-Denis is the working-class suburb where crowds come for soccer games.
...bright ones the effect of that struggle now.
...and activists from different countries are starting to unite: French joined Americans for the first time in their latest No Kings (anti-Trump, pro-democracy) rally at symbolic place de la Bastille...
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March 28, 2026 / Democrats Abroad |
Mustafa Orhan Selçuk
LA DIGUE, FEDERER POUR RESISTER (The Dyke, federate to resist)
...while an hour later a massive demonstration for Gaza took place steps away, on the crossroad where workers built a barricade during their first great revolt:
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La Barricade du Faubourg Saint-Antoine by Gaspard Gobaut, 1848
-- Musée Carnavalet, not exhibited
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Today the conflict is between the globalized capitalists that the far-right backs and democratic socialists who provide solutions to problems that face us all.
By revealing a conditioning of which we are usually unaware, these blooks contribute to their fight.
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| Harald Wolff |
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