Long live France!
Written by Alfonso Elizondo
The election in France on Sunday April 22 has shown me the great mistake I made in my previous article, where I predicted that France would leave the European Union as soon as they elected their new President. I mistakenly thought that there was a similarity between the present political culture of the US and France, since in both cases the idea of ensuring the political equality of all social classes arose from the French Revolution. The Revolution’s basic aim was to defend the French popular classes who at the end of the eighteenth century lived in deplorable conditions as degraded servants of the aristocratic classes, with no wages or benefits of any kind, in addition to being treated as inferior.
But the great difference between France and the United States was that France’s democratic, representative, republican model of the state was based on the emergence of a new and genuine moral awareness in its ruling class, whereas in the United States it was a primitive mythology resulting from the circumstantial alliance between Quakers and Freemasons who saw themselves as the beneficiaries of divine favor who could do as they wished with those who were not members of their white Anglo-Saxon race. That explains why now, two hundred years later, the US government has become an impregnable bureaucratic force, absolute owner in control of all the actions of that great nation, both inside and outside the country. It has devoted most of its fiscal revenues to planning wars in distant territories, to the management of mercenary forces, and to the creation of a fake terrorist army in the Middle East to justify its agencies dedicated to spying and secret wars, such as the CIA and the FBI. It is engaged in amassing an abundance of floating capital without any legal backing, by issuing paper money from its Central Bank and granting multimillion-dollar concessions to very wealthy entrepreneurs in the prison system – which is the largest in the world. Its focus is on financial companies that operate with speculative capital, who are involved in the production of drugs and weapons and who operate social services of all kinds, such as the real estate industry, television shows, events, private education and sports.
But the most important thing is that industrial production that uses manufacturing labor has been disappearing because companies in the sector have moved to regions in Asia where labor is cheap and there are no tax and environmental requirements, and also because of the emergence of new production technologies that no longer require human labor. However, the people with responsibility for US policy do not have the ability to understand that the industrial world that once allowed them to generate wealth to benefit their working classes came to an end many decades ago, and that the employment rate has fallen dramatically. They have also failed to recognize that the idea of a university education facilitating the material success of coming generations has disappeared, both for Generation ‘Z’ and the ‘Millennials’ who obtain digital work at a very young age, that what has emerged are young people wanting to be independent, who have no fixed residence and that the traditional family that required sources of income from both spouses has died. It seems that a new economic and political era will begin and no one has any idea how it will work, but it is certainly the most visible sign of the end of post-industrial society in the United States, whether for good or ill.
Fortunately for the Western world, the thinking of the younger generation of French people still retains that wonderful ethical and social value of equality among human beings, even if it has been shedding the different ideologies that have existed for a little over than two centuries, has no dominant religion and retains the idea that equality between human beings extends to all ethnic groups and to all existing social groups.
I have no doubt that the young French presidential candidate, Emanuel Macron, who is only 39 and has been trained in the French public service, will beat the far-right Marine Le Pen by a wide margin. Luckily for Europe and the West, the younger generation of French people still maintain the spirit of equality on which the world in which we live was founded, while the vestiges of fascism are disappearing.
Addendum: There is no doubt that Macron will be the next president of France, with an overwhelming vote of about 70% of the total French electorate in his favor, since all the political parties and the many independent groups that participated in last Sunday’s primary elections have announced their decision to support him in the upcoming runoff elections in two weeks.
And so France will undoubtedly renew political ties with the different countries of the European Union and reformulate its economic and trade plans. Meanwhile, as usual, England, with Theresa May’s “brilliant” idea of calling new parliamentary elections, will be able to explain its departure from the EU by a majority vote in the new parliament of pro-Brexit conservatives.