Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Frédéric Pajak

clothes itself in the greatest confusion possible. It feels at home in uproar. Imperceptibly, insidiously, it crept into our language, our customs, our judgments, and the way we perceive reality, beginning with History. Now it is precisely this history, this movement between past, present, and future, which the modern ideology wants to deprive us of. It purposely omits the past, the better to wallow in the present, a present that must make us forget the future at all costs. The future: let us not forget that the ideologies of the 20th century were relentless in their efforts to forget the present so they could abandon themselves to the promise of a necessarily better, necessarily radiant future. Today, the future is above all a threat, a terrible and dangerous world we must erase from our minds. For that, all we need to do is to cause the future to be forgotten. And, as soon as the future is forgotten, we can forget the past. But we cannot erase the past completely. It therefore must appear in a way the present can support: a distant past, hazy, consisting of royal wigs, naval battles, triumphant conquests. Only magisterial dates must remain, dates of heroic battles and museumized splendors. It is on this travesty of the past and the rejection of the future that modern ideology is bases itself and continues to act as an ideology. It proceeds

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