Well, that is only a slight exaggeration since change — if by that is meant a real change in the relations of power — has never been effected by elections.
As satirist Tom Lehrer once sang about the SCUM ((I heard once from someone in the US Navy that this was the only word you can make from the letters u-s-m-c)): “All their rights respected, until someone WE like can be elected”. Elections have always been a ritual to stabilize a regime not to change it. Some regimes prefer other means or better said dispense with the cosmetics.
But just as the USA harbours the biggest advertising and PR firms — for whose economic benefit that country’s peculiar election style has emerged (and proliferated) — it also has the world’s largest military, police and prison system to maintain the regime for which elections are the plastic surgery.
For those who can still remember the Soviet Union it is fair to say that elections there were no less intended to stabilize the regime. Strangely enough after 1989 elections in the Russian Federation or elsewhere were viewed as illegitimate when people freely voted communist.
Of course, nearly all of Western Europe would have voted Communist after 1945 had it not been for the massive bribery, criminal terror, military force and corporate propaganda funded, planned and perpetrated by the US regime through what L Fletcher Prouty called “the Secret Team” and Philip Agee called “capitalism’s invisible army” (aka CIA).
It was the CIA in the form of Preston Goodfellow ((CIA officer John Hart was only one of the fabulous who went on to help establish the means for massacring electorally deficient Vietnamese after Korea was divided between a wasteland and a fascist-managed atomic bridgehead to China (which it remains today despite electoral oscillations). The extent of CIA involvement in Korea—especially in the counter-insurgency waged against the Southern peasantry by USMGK and its local help—can only be estimated since, as Prouty also explained, it is extremely difficult to tell who, in fact, is CIA, or the Secret Team.)) and Syngman Rhee that gave us the unending war in Korea — then for tungsten and cheap rice. Of course, the invisible army, which includes those who fund it and from whom it profits, has not ceased to manipulate what ordinary people have been taught is the peaceful way to get their interests respected.
We know that German and French and Italian elections have been manipulated by the Secret Team/ invisible army since 1945.
We even know now that the British subsidiary gave Mussolini to Italy.
The prima facie evidence is that Hitler would not have been “elected” without the weapons and money he and his NSDAP received to terrorize the opposition– and still he only got a plurality because the Roman Catholic Church, ruled then by fascist Pius XII, ordered the dissolution of the Center Party.
In short a serious examination of election history will show that the majority has never freely elected fascists. This does not mean that fascism was devoid of popular support. Most of this support came from the supposedly educated (indoctrinated is a better word) whom George Orwell called “the outer party” — the civil servants, middle managers, university trained, whom even Professor Chomsky without the least sense of irony called the most heavily propagandized segment of the population.
One has to bear all this in mind when one attempts to explain the seemingly disparate events in Ukraine, Britain, Netherlands, Brazil, Venezuela and, yes, in France.
In an interview given in 2016 one of Sarkozy’s former ministers affirmed what can be read but is rarely said:
The US regime bought the Partie Socialiste Francaise decades ago. That was in the days when people like Irving Brown, Jay Lovestone (for the invisible army) and Corsican friends paid people in the PSF to break with the Communists. ((Author’s Note: One of the most difficult concepts to understand is that of bribery and covert party or political financing. Bribery and covert financing are not like normal business transactions among knowing parties. If I say I will buy a car from someone I may know the price and I may or may not be able to judge whether the price I am asked to pay will deliver what I want or believe I am getting. I may make a mistake or I may be willing to pay more or less than someone else. If only the buyer and seller are involved this is a question of relative risk.
Bribery however relies not only on a lie but the pretense that there has been no lie or possibility to lie. If I pay an expert for his work then he may or may not be good but the result is independent of the price. If however I pay for the result– that is I want a certain value, then the fee I pay becomes a bribe as soon as the result becomes the product– if this product is then used to deceive the potential buyer.
Because we are supposed to in fact must believe that a candidate for a certain party is at least obliged to support that party’s platform or programme, the knowledge that this person is paid or otherwise rewarded for contrary or ambivalent if not treacherous conduct is a special but not exceptional form of corruption. This corruption relies on class distinctions. If this were a mere trade in votes then theoretically the whole working population of a constituency could buy their representatives. But that is not allowed since the law prohibits buying votes– openly by anyone who wants an interest represented.
The reason for this prohibition is not to prevent bribery but to exclude the vast majority from any attempt to buy their own deputies.
When the secret team buys influence– meaning it bribes party members across the board– it does so because it has the class monopoly on such trade. The open buying of votes or other forms of influence cannot be permitted because the obligation incurred by the “bought” can only be redeemed at the bank of the ruling class and its agents. It relies on the moral order that bribes cannot be given or taken. However like all other moral orders, this applies only to the rest of us.
It is not necessary to eliminate an enemy’s entire army– just their will to fight. It takes only a fraction of an army or a party hierarchy to destroy an entire force. The petty moral obligation or the fear of the invisible buyer are enough to keep most bribed people in line. Have a doubt? What kept you from quitting your job the last time?))
I remember writing here some time past how I witnessed the spectacle of the former Vichy civil servant Mitterrand being elected to France’s high office as a “socialist” in 1981. I say no more.
So what happened in this year’s presidential election in France? Let me conclude with a brief analysis:
Ordinary French people, like Greeks, Italians, Spanish and Portuguese have watched their economies plundered by the vermin of Goldman Sachs and their cohorts, facilitated by every elected politician — by omission or commission — and coordinated by the European Commission (and I should add the European Council which gives them their marching orders more or less). Most have not gathered that this plunder is enforced by NATO — which can demand more tax money than hospitals or schools (and is wholly unelected by the way). But the dissatisfaction of the South of Europe is audible. So this dissatisfaction has to be neutralized.
The educated/indoctrinated are manipulated through their hypocrisy: they love the slaughter of Muslims as long as it is abroad or deniable at home. The seasonal “terror” displays are designed to channel emotions to the Right while preserving the hypocritical pretense that the “real Right” like Le Pen is not a legitimate part of our Christian cultural heritage. (To avoid nausea I refrain from elaborating as to what that heritage actually comprises.)
After Hollande performed his function of destroying what remained of the PSF as a channel for socialist sentiments, Le Pen had to draw all the anti-EU sentiment from the electorate — something like applying leeches. Then Macron was applied like the burning end of a Gitane cigarette to the legs of France’s working and unemployed class to remove the leech. Thus the electorate could be led by their prefects out of the swamp of anti-EU sentiment, yet still exhausted by the march, into the desert of Goldman Sachs and their ilk to be bit by the scorpions of the invisible army while they slowly dehydrate for the 1%. Of course, the further south one goes — the hotter and drier it gets.