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

For history, ads reveal the mentality that their sponsors seek to impose, with which official views of the past coincide. 

           Richard Nahem, 2020

They hover over great cities like Big Brother, as in Paris since 2011.

     Union Square in Manhattan, 2025 / Elisabeth Rawson

In New York, same thing.

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 with no link to tangible forces fit that attitude.

At the Châtelet crossroad in central Paris, June 2022

• Isolation: Most figures are alone, without social ties. Erasing insurrections and any kind of collective mobilization corresponds.

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

• Void. Empty backgrounds tell spectators that the outside world is irrelevant. The commercial vision of Paris fits that absence —  and now even that can be suppressed:

The Opéra, September 2025

The facade of the Opéra turned into a support for ads in 2023.

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The history presented here shows how all elements of a society buttress the ruling class. French examples:

• "Your father was a valet!," was an insult among humble people under the Old Regime. Everyone accepted the social hierarchy based on birth because of the an innumerable ways in which daily life reinforced it.  

• Ignoring Parisian oddities: long, wide, straight streets that lead to voids much too vast for traffic, references to Louis XIV at Napoleon's tomb, the libertine painting at the Opéra's heart... .

It also explains that economic changes brings struggle between new and established forces: in France, "What gave you all that wealth? You took the trouble to be born"  precedes the Revolution. Comparable change is happening now, as immense companies blow away what people hold dear...

Harald Wolff

And leads them to resist.

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

Viewing the past is part of that fight. Emphasizing prominent individuals and philosophies divorced from the economy hides the social structure and who benefits from it coincides with control from the right, while seeing history as the study of economic change and the social conflicts it brings comes from the left:

* In France discredit of right-wing collaborationists and respect for the largely left-wing Resistance brought the leftist view after World War II. It faded with post-war industrialization, and with the rise of multinationals has almost disappeared.

In the U.S. the economic base vanished from history with the Cold War. Personal memory: Classes in modern European intellectual history at Vassar College and Russian history in the Soviet Union Program at Harvard did not mention Marx or his materialism even once.  

Spotlighting a manipulation of which we are usually unaware is part of the coming fight. 

Harald Wolff

That is these blooks' main purpose.

If you find them useful,

please pass them on.

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