What follows is an English translation of an article by Andrea Zhok, originally published in Italian on his Telegram channel. To his analysis, impeccable as always, I would simply add that the problem, in my view, is actually much deeper, because it goes beyond mere socioeconomic deprivation, inequality and techno-fascist rule. My impression is that these explosions of violence are also a reflection of the nihilist void in which Western societies have sunk — a desperate revolt against a system that is increasingly incapable of providing basic material wellbeing, but also against a culture utterly incapable of giving meaning to people’s lives. When purposelessness, anxiety, emotional emptiness and despair become the norm, the result will inevitably be collective depression — or violence.
The images of flames engulfing the town hall in Limoges, France, and of its bell tower collapsing, are going round the world. Episodes like this can only be condemned, just as one can only condemn the looting that has accompanied the protests in many parts of France.
And yet, if we stopped at this level of reflection, we would simply be engaging in a classic exercise in petty-bourgeois conservatism — which has its reasons, but which is also dramatically short-sighted. To start preaching about burnt-out cars and smashed shop windows, and go no further, merely shows that one has not yet grasped the seriousness of the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
What we are witnessing in France — and, in different forms, in many other European countries by now (Spain, Portugal, Albania, Belgium and, since yesterday, Italy too) — is anything but an irrational event. There are historical events that appear irrational only from close up, but which possess an evident rationality when viewed from a sufficient height.
Rational does not mean painless, nor does it mean free of injustice.
We must train ourselves to hold two levels of analysis together: one at which specific acts and specific individuals can be judged barbaric, uncivilised, vandalistic; and one at which we can (and must) understand that history is always a river carrying debris and corpses — but one that cannot be stopped by sermons.
What is happening has an iron collective rationality, even if those taking part in it often have only a limited understanding of it, or none at all.
For many years now, Europe’s peoples have experienced their ruling classes as an anonymous technocratic organism — a self-propelled rubber wall moving on “autopilot”, utterly indifferent to the needs of the population. The wager of these finance-linked technocratic elites has been that they could lull consciences to sleep with today’s opium of the people, the media (entertainment and infotainment), and tame the recalcitrant with restrictive measures (a truncheon blow here, a closed bank account there, a tweak to an electoral law one moment, an annulled election the next, and so on).
The general assumption of Europe’s leaderships — tacit and unquestioned — is that one does not reason with the plebs: one simply alternates the carrot and the stick.
Everything that is said publicly is always an instrumental lie, without exception — save for the occasional case in which a truth can itself be put to instrumental use. Public discourse has become an endless performance that cares less and less about preserving even a semblance of credibility.
Thus no one in their right mind really believes that Russia is about to invade us, but this does not stop legions of institutional nonentities from repeating this bollocks with a straight face every day. And of course everyone knows that, in this game of fairy tales pumped out by a press for hire, the only thing that matters — the one fixed point as circumstances change — is the intention to dispose arbitrarily of public resources and channel them towards private interests.
In short, the ruling classes have long since grown used to treating the population as a dumb beast, to which no rational justification is owed and which is to be handled, on the one hand, with selective flattery and targeted privileges and, on the other, by being rendered powerless.
And this mechanism can work, and does work, for a long time. Until it doesn’t.
And it stops working the day too many people are losing too much to be able to afford to remain in a state of torpor. “Losing too much” here should not be taken to mean something like “death by starvation”. In a modern society, people enter a condition of unbearable deprivation long before they “starve to death”.
Today, for instance, being unable to afford to use a car or to access the internet means, for the majority of the population, being cut off from the world, from work, from social life, from life itself. And the fact that cars and mobile phones were once luxury goods means nothing: this is now the new threshold of “participation in common life”, what separates life from non-life.
Plebs raised like beasts of burden, to be fed the occasional panem et circenses, shit jobs and televised snake oil, are not — and will not be — receptive, on the day this game breaks down, to arguments about public decorum, respect for property, reverence for monuments and so on.
Those burning cars, historic buildings and shops are culturally and morally deprived. But the real culprits, the ones who should be made to pay, are the elites at the top who cultivated and wanted that deprivation, thinking it served their purposes.
Today the pressure cooker is about to blow. Even if this wave subsides, this is only the beginning, because Europe’s ruling classes are in no position — neither materially nor culturally — to change course. So fasten your seatbelts: we are heading for a crash.
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Latest book: The Brussels Empire: The EU’s Silent Coup Against Democracy (German version only for now: Die Brüsseler Tyrannei: oder Der diskrete Staatsstreich)
“Nietzsche was the first to draw a frightening picture of the modern world, which has been relentlessly repeated by everyone ever since: the collapse of culture: education is replaced by empty knowledge; spiritual substance — by the universal facade of fake life; boredom is drowned out by drugs of all kinds and thrills; every living spiritual germ is suppressed by the noise and rumble of the illusory spirit; everyone talks, but no one listens; everything decays in the flow of words; everything is blabbed and betrayed. None other than Nietzsche showed the desert of the mad race for profit; showed the meaning of the machine and the mechanization of labor; showed the meaning of the emerging phenomenon — the masses. But all this is for Nietzsche in the foreground, a ripple on the surface. Today, “when the whole earth is trembling, when everything is cracking at the seams,” the main events take place in the depths, and what we observe are only consequences; a resident of a cozy age of calm and complacent bourgeoisie, Nietzsche writes with a shudder of genuine horror about what no one has yet noticed: the main event is that “God is dead”. “Here is the monstrous news that will not reach the consciousness of Europeans until a few centuries from now; but then — then it will long seem to them that things have lost their reality…”. “The rise of nihilism,” Nietzsche predicts, “will be the history of the next two centuries. Our whole European culture has long been moving with agonizing tension, with trembling and grinding, increasing from decade to decade, toward catastrophe; not moving calmly, but convulsively, in rapid spurts, as if by force: “I wish it would end sooner rather than later, if only to avoid waking up, because it is so terrible to wake up and come to your senses”… Whereas for Christianity the general course of history was predetermined and the question of the salvation of the soul remained open for each individual, for Nietzsche the direction of the general process is in question: in which direction it will go depends on the will and activity of man. Hegel refused to pose the question of the future; Marx urged to hasten the coming of what was already coming by virtue of necessity, which, as it seemed to him, was irrefutably proven by his science; but Nietzsche saw in the future the most terrible danger: man can perish, can become an ape again, if at the last moment he does not succeed in decisively changing the direction of history.” — Karl Jaspers
“Progress is pure illusion. It affects only the sphere of matter, while the spirit is inexorably degenerating. What our contemporaries pass off as achievements are in fact shameful vices — rejection of religion as a prejudice, amoralism as an overcoming of complexes, contempt for the past as arrogant ignorance, stupidity elevated to a norm. Reality becomes ghostly. Aristocratic ideals oppose the false ideals of liberalism; they are replaced by the lowbrow tastes of the crowds — the market and entertainment, social conformism and intellectual anarchy. Rationalism, criticalism, relativism and all such mutilated trends carry a profane element that has completely permeated the modern world. The end of the modern world is but the end of illusion.” — René Guénon