Fides Punica

 

'In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.' 

The opening words of 'The Society of the Spectacle' [Guy Debord; 1967, Buchet-Chastel, Paris] stand as a touchstone for the future to come. At the time of its writing, few outside the radical Left or Situationist International would have recognized the style or substance of his reasoning, but from the historical hindsight of a standpoint in the global North of 2022, it's patently obvious that he saw deeper than the surface gloss of mere party politics.

What was then an incipient tendency has grown insidiously to be the normal state of being for most: advanced by neoliberal global elites and evidenced by the banality of most social media content, non-linear and linear TV, and advertising: '...the more [the spectator] contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and desires.' Debord, ibid.

In Doris Pooh the Younger and his bread & circuses government, we have the embodiment of the Situationist thesis: lie, dissemble, fumble and stumble, but make sure the image sticks and that the people go '...uh - OK...'. When taxed with gaffes of his own making so egregious that most would be marched off the premises on the spot, the Bear of Little Substance simply moves on to the next spectacle, in this case Ukraine, which he erroneously believes will be his Falklands moment in the sun.

Except it won't and can't possibly be. We simply ain't got the international influence or substance that he wrongly assumes we still wield. Couple this with NATO's rather unwarranted supine attitude to Putin [cf. Jeremy Cliffe, 'World View', New Statesman 18-24 Feb.] and things can only get worse for Ukraine. Again, as Cliffe points out in his piece, Putin's Russia's military and economic clout pales besides the NATO alliance, and we should have taken a more hardline stance from the outset.

A niggling thought remains, though, that the resistance to dealing properly with Putin's ambitions is more to do with a reluctance to upset the lucrative wealth management apple cart that operates through London, channelling and laundering the Russian oligarchy's billions into safely tax-free boltholes and private banks. Not for the first time in history [understatement alert] does greed and profit triumph over morality and true statesmanship.

Anyone who labours under the misapprehension that the abolition of slavery was an entirely altruistic endeavour should read 'Capitalism and Slavery' by Eric Williams, first published in 1944. Slavery fell out of favour in line with its decreasing profitability, but abolition took the moral kudos whilst institutionalizing a system of compensation for the slavers rather than the enslaved,  ensuring the continued wealth of those compensated and the continued poverty of existence to the previous fruits of their capitalist profitability. Spectacle - as Debord and The Situationists had it, was not something new or indeed novel.

Codicil: OK - so now Johnson is suggesting that Putin is planning "...the biggest war in Europe since 1945..." - more bluster and diversion from the man who practically invented running off at the mouth, and whose ill-advised and ill-thought-out public utterances have already caused God knows how much grief to date. A dangerous man who needs his platform shutting down before he causes any more damage...