• Neel Doff, Keetje Tippel (Jours de famine et de détresse #1911)
    https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Jours_de_famine_et_de_d%C3%A9tresse/Texte_entier

    Amsterdam 1869 - 1871

    Über den Unterschied zwischen Mietkutschern, modernen Arbeitern, und Privatkutschern, abhängigen Domestiken

    La première fois qu’il monta sur le siège d’un fiacre, il fut honteux comme d’une déchéance, mais plus tard il en jugeait autrement, et disait que les cochers de fiacre étaient des ouvriers, tandis que les cochers de maître étaient des domestiques.

    Abeitsbedingungen: keine Schutzkleidung, aufgebrochene trockene Haut

    Ce bon fauteuil en paille, si père l’avait le soir pour se reposer, comme il y serait bien, appuyé contre le dossier, une chaufferette aux pieds pour sécher ses bas ! Car il souffre beaucoup, père, quand, par ce temps, il doit nettoyer les voitures en plein air : ses mains sont gonflées comme des pelotes, et de grandes crevasses le torturent la nuit, au point de l’empêcher de dormir.

    Abeitsbedingungen: Abhängigkeit von Trinkfeldern, Basislohn zahlt kaum Miete der Unterkunft

    Quel froid ! Quel froid ! On ne m’a pas laissé faire une seule course, aujourd’hui : j’ai dû, toute la journée, nettoyer des voitures à la rue, par cette température. Les cochons ! ils savent bien cependant que, quand je ne reçois pas de pourboires, nous sommes sans pain : ce n’est pas avec leurs trois florins par semaine que je puis entretenir un ménage de neuf enfants.

    Folgen des verfestigten Elends: Verlust der Empathie und aller sozialen Maßstäbe, Akzeptanz jeglicher Lebensbedingungen, Unfähigkeit zu Empöhrung oder Auflehnung

    Croyant que c’était la police, je m’étais jetée, terrifiée, contre le géant, ce qui le mit encore en joie. Il m’entoura de ses bras, et riant doucement, murmura :

    -- Allons, petite ! Allons, petite !

    Comme j’étais bien sur cette immense poitrine ! Pour la première fois de ma vie, je me sentis protégée. Tous les sbires de la ville n’auraient pu dénouer les bras qui m’enserraient : il leur aurait dit, amusé :

    -- Voyons, c’est une petite, une petite.

    Une fois dans la rue, je galopai vers ma mère. Nous achetâmes de pauvres vivres, et, dès le bas de l’escalier, nous criâmes aux enfants :

    -- Nous avons du pain ! nous avons du pain !

    Au bout de quelques jours, notre ménage marcha régulièrement, comme jamais il n’avait marché. Les enfants mangeaient aux heures, étaient lavés, allaient à l’école ; ma mère vaquait au ménage ; mon père ne buvait plus : il faisait le café et pelait les pommes de terre. Seule, je rageais et pleurais, accroupie sur le vieux canapé qui me servait de lit.

    La simplicité avec laquelle mes parents s’adaptaient à cette situation, me les faisait prendre en une aversion qui croissait chaque jour. Ils en étaient arrivés à oublier que moi, la plus jolie de la nichée, je me prostituais tous les soirs aux passants. Sans doute, il n’y avait d’autre moyen pour nous de ne pas mourir de faim, mais je me refusais à admettre que ce moyen fût accepté sans la révolte et les imprécations qui, nuit et jour, me secouaient.

    J’étais trop jeune pour comprendre que, chez eux, la misère avait achevé son œuvre, tandis que j’avais toute ma jeunesse et toute ma vigueur pour me cabrer devant le sort.

    #Kutscher #Armut #Arbeiterklasse

  • Chris #Hedges Interviews Noam #Chomsky (1/3)

    Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges speaks with Professor Noam Chomsky about working-class resistance during the Industrial Revolution, propaganda, and the historical role played by intellectuals in times of war - June 17, 14

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwRf5HHm2Mo

    – chez TRNN avec une trace écrite: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12006

    [...]

    [I]n the early 19th century, the business world recognized, both in England and the United States, that sufficient freedom had been won so that they could no longer control people just by violence. They had to turn to new means of control. The obvious ones were control of opinions and attitudes. That’s the origins of the massive public relations industry, which is explicitly dedicated to controlling minds and attitudes.

    The first—it partly was government. The first government commission was the British Ministry of Information. This is long before Orwell—he didn’t have to invent it. So the Ministry of Information had as its goal to control the minds of the people of the world, but particularly the minds of American intellectuals, for a very good reason: they knew that if they can delude American intellectuals into supporting British policy, they could be very effective in imposing that on the population of the United States. The British, of course, were desperate to get the Americans into the war with a pacifist population. Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election with the slogan “Peace without Victory”. And they had to drive a pacifist population into a population that bitterly hated all things German, wanted to tear the Germans apart. The Boston Symphony Orchestra couldn’t play Beethoven. You know. And they succeeded.

    Wilson set up a counterpart to the Ministry of Information called the Committee on Public Information. You know, again, you can guess what it was. And they’ve at least felt, probably correctly, that they had succeeded in carrying out this massive change of opinion on the part of the population and driving the pacifist population into, you know, warmongering fanatics.

    And the people on the commission learned a lesson. One of them was Edward Bernays, who went on to found—the main guru of the public relations industry. Another one was Walter Lippman, who was the leading progressive intellectual of the 20th century. And they both drew the same lessons, and said so.

    The lessons were that we have what Lippmann called a “new art” in democracy, “manufacturing consent”. That’s where Ed Herman and I took the phrase from. For Bernays it was “engineering of consent”. The conception was that the intelligent minority, who of course is us, have to make sure that we can run the affairs of public affairs, affairs of state, the economy, and so on. We’re the only ones capable of doing it, of course. And we have to be—I’m quoting—"free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd", the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders”—the general public. They have a role. Their role is to be “spectators”, not participants. And every couple of years they’re permitted to choose among one of the “responsible men”, us.

    And the John Dewey circle took the same view. Dewey changed his mind a couple of years later, to his credit, but at that time, Dewey and his circle were writing that—speaking of the First World War, that this was the first war in history that was not organized and manipulated by the military and the political figures and so on, but rather it was carefully planned by rational calculation of “the intelligent men of the community”, namely us, and we thought it through carefully and decided that this is the reasonable thing to do, for all kind of benevolent reasons.

    And they were very proud of themselves.

    There were people who disagreed. Like, Randolph Bourne disagreed. He was kicked out. He couldn’t write in the Deweyite journals. He wasn’t killed, you know, but he was just excluded.

    And if you take a look around the world, it was pretty much the same. The intellectuals on all sides were passionately dedicated to the national cause—all sides, Germans, British, everywhere.

    There were a few, a fringe of dissenters, like Bertrand Russell, who was in jail; Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, in jail; Randolph Bourne, marginalized; Eugene Debs, in jail for daring to question the magnificence of the war. In fact, Wilson hated him with such passion that when he finally declared an amnesty, Debs was left out, you know, had to wait for Warren Harding to release him. And he was the leading labor figure in the country. He was a candidate for president, Socialist Party, and so on.

    But the lesson that came out is we believe you can and of course ought to control the public, and if we can’t do it by force, we’ll do it by manufacturing consent, by engineering of consent. Out of that comes the huge public relations industry, massive industry dedicated to this.

    Incidentally, it’s also dedicated to undermining markets, a fact that’s rarely noticed but is quite obvious. Business hates markets. They don’t want to—and you can see it very clearly. Markets, if you take an economics course, are based on rational, informed consumers making rational choices. Turn on the television set and look at the first ad you see. It’s trying to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. That’s the whole point of the huge advertising industry. But also to try to control and manipulate thought. And it takes various forms in different institutions. The media do it one way, the academic institutions do it another way, and the educational system is a crucial part of it.

    This is not a new observation. There’s actually an interesting essay by—Orwell’s, which is not very well known because it wasn’t published. It’s the introduction to Animal Farm. In the introduction, he addresses himself to the people of England and he says, you shouldn’t feel too self-righteous reading this satire of the totalitarian enemy, because in free England, ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. And he doesn’t say much about it. He actually has two sentences. He says one reason is the press “is owned by wealthy men” who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed.

    But the second reason, and the more important one in my view, is a good education, so that if you’ve gone to all the good schools, you know, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn’t do to say—and I don’t think he went far enough: wouldn’t do to think. And that’s very broad among the educated classes. That’s why overwhelmingly they tend to support state power and state violence, and maybe with some qualifications, like, say, Obama is regarded as a critic of the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because he thought it was a strategic blunder. That puts him on the same moral level as some Nazi general who thought that the second front was a strategic blunder—you should knock off England first. That’s called criticism.

    [...]

    #industrialisation
    #media #histoire #Geschichte #institution
    #USA #England #Angleterre
    #Grande-Bretagne #Great_Britain #Großbritannien
    #Allemagne #Germany #Deutschland

    #contrôle #Kontrolle
    #résistance #Widerstand
    #working_class #ouvriers #Arbeiterklasse
    #éducation #Bildung
    #intellectuels

    • Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (2/3)

      http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12016

      [...]

      Like a lot of people, I’ve written a lot about media and intellectual propaganda, but there’s another question which isn’t studied much: how effective is it? And that’s—when you brought up the polls, it’s a striking illustration. The propaganda is—you can see from the poll results that the propaganda has only limited effectiveness. I mean, it can drive a population into terror and fear and war hysteria, like before the Iraq invasion or 1917 and so on, but over time, public attitudes remain quite different. In fact, studies even of what’s called the right-wing, you know, people who say, get the government off my back, that kind of sector, they turn out to be kind of social democratic. They want more spending on health, more spending on education, more spending on, say, women with dependent children, but not welfare, no spending on welfare, because Reagan, who was an extreme racist, succeeded in demonizing the notion of welfare. So in people’s minds welfare means a rich black woman driving in her limousine to the welfare office to steal your money. Well, nobody wants that. But they want what welfare does.

      Foreign aid is an interesting case. There’s an enormous propaganda against foreign aid, ’cause we’re giving everything to the undeserving people out there. You take a look at public attitudes. A lot of opposition to foreign aid. Very high. On the other hand, when you ask people, how much do we give in foreign aid? Way beyond what we give. When you ask what we should give in foreign aid, far above what we give.

      And this runs across the board. Take, say taxes. There’ve been studies of attitudes towards taxes for 40 years. Overwhelmingly the population says taxes are much too low for the rich and the corporate sector. You’ve got to raise it. What happens? Well, the opposite.

      [...]

      #propagande
      #effectiveness #efficacité #Effizienz

    • Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (3/3)

      http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12018

      #ows #occupy
      #cooperatives

      [...]

      Well, I think it’s a little misleading to call it a movement. Occupy was a tactic, in fact a brilliant tactic. I mean, if I’d been asked a couple of months earlier whether they should take over public places, I would have said it’s crazy. But it worked extremely well, and it lit a spark which went all over the place. Hundreds and hundreds of places in the country, there were Occupy events. It was all over the world. I mean, I gave talks in Sydney, Australia, to the Occupy movement there. But it was a tactic, a very effective tactic. Changed public discourse, not policy. It brought issues to the forefront.I think my own feeling is its most important contribution was just to break through the atomization of the society. I mean, it’s a very atomized society. There’s all sorts of efforts to separate people from one another, as if the ideal social unit is, you know, you and your TV set.

      HEDGES: You know, Hannah Arendt raises atomization as one of the key components of totalitarianism.

      CHOMSKY: Exactly. And the Occupy actions broke that down for a large part of the population. People could recognize that we can get together and do things for ourselves, we can have a common kitchen, we can have a place for public discourse, we can form our ideas and do something. Now, that’s an important attack on the core of the means by which the public is controlled. So you’re not just an individual trying to maximize your consumption, but there are other concerns in life, and you can do something about them. If those attitudes and associations and bonds can be sustained and move in other directions, that’ll be important.

      But going back to Occupy, it’s a tactic. Tactics have a kind of a half-life. You can’t keep doing them, and certainly you can’t keep occupying public places for very long. And was very successful, but it was not in itself a movement. The question is: what happens to the people who were involved in it? Do they go on and develop, do they move into communities, pick up community issues? Do they organize?

      Take, say, this business of, say, worker-owned industry. Right here in Massachusetts, not far from here, there was something similar. One of the multinationals decided to close down a fairly profitable small plant, which was producing aerospace equipment. High-skilled workers and so on, but it wasn’t profitable enough, so they were going to close it down. The union wanted to buy it. Company refused—usual class reasons, I think. If the Occupy efforts had been available at the time, they could have provided the public support for it.

      [...]

      Well, you know, a reconstituted auto industry could have turned in that direction under worker and community control. I don’t think these things are out of sight. And, incidentally, they even have so-called conservative support, because they’re within a broader what’s called capitalist framework (it’s not really capitalist). And those are directions that should be pressed.

      Right now, for example, the Steelworkers union is trying to establish some kind of relations with Mondragon, the huge worker-owned conglomerate in the Basque country in Spain, which is very successful, in fact, and includes industry, manufacturing, banks, hospitals, living quarters. It’s very broad. It’s not impossible that that can be brought here, and it’s potentially radical. It’s creating the basis for quite a different society.

      [...]

      #militarisation
      #Militarisierung #Aufrüstung

      #war_crime #Iraq
      #crime_de_guerre
      #Kriegsverbrechen
      #Nürnberg

      [...]

      Go back to the #Nuremberg judgments. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but in Nuremberg aggression was defined as “the supreme international crime,” differing from other war crimes in that it includes, it encompasses all of the evil that follows. Well, the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq is a textbook case of aggression. By the standards of Nuremberg, they’d all be hanged. And one of the things it did, one of the crimes was to ignite a Sunni-Shiite conflict which hadn’t been going on. I mean, there was, you know, various kinds of tensions, but Iraqis didn’t believe there could ever be a conflict. They were intermarried, they lived in the same places, and so on. But the invasion set it off. Took off on its own. By now it’s inflaming the whole region. Now we’re at the point where Sunni jihadi forces are actually marching on Baghdad.

      HEDGES: And the Iraqi army is collapsing.

      CHOMSKY: The Iraqi army’s just giving away their arms. There obviously is a lot of collaboration going on.And all of this is a U.S. crime if we believe in the validity of the judgments against the Nazis.

      And it’s kind of interesting. Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor, a U.S. justice, at the tribunal, addressed the tribunal, and he pointed out, as he put it, that we’re giving these defendants a “poisoned chalice”, and if we ever sip from it, we have to be treated the same way, or else the whole thing is a farce and we should recognize this as just victor’s justice.

      [...]