During the week I saw a video from Lyon where a man stands in front of what was once a Zara and, completely bewildered, asks what on earth this has to do with Palestine.
On Friday a friend wrote from Nice about the shopkeepers who the Monday before had been sweeping up glass, and who were now walking around dreading that it would come again over the weekend. More of the same. Vandalism, theft, a rampage against what they have spent a whole life building up.
And in the middle of it all there is a detail that none of the big media have found interesting. But which I, for my part, have not been able to let go of.
The black-clad, masked hordes.
They walked past the discount shops.
City after city.
At first I found that strange. Almost bizarre. Because we know perfectly well who they are and what they say they want.
But then the penny dropped.
The far left and the Islamists, the two groups that hate the West and capitalism more than anything else in the world, were finally allowed, one Friday evening in October, to show their true colours - and they stormed neither a bank, a stock exchange nor a ministry. Instead they went straight for the premium brand stores. The expensive shopfronts. The very goods they have been howling about for years, the whole chain from raw material to advertising, the climate, the working conditions, the retail end, everything that according to them hollows out and exploits and oppresses the world.
Those were the goods they wanted to get their hands on.
Not a bottle of water.
It was a ridiculously expensive designer bag, a designer jacket or a premium priced phone. The epitome of what they have spent their whole youth despising.
I actually think there is something beautiful about it. Not about the destruction of course, but about the clarity. Because in that moment a mask fell that has been stuck on for a hundred years.
Come back in time with me for a moment here.
In 1917 the communists took power in Russia, and from 1929 Stalin decided that all land should belong to the state. The peasants were no longer to own their farms, they were to work on shared collective farms.
But there was one problem.
Some peasants had done a little better than the others. They had two cows instead of one, a slightly bigger barn, perhaps a farmhand taken on at harvest. The state gave them a name. "Kulak". It means fist, and it was not meant kindly. And in December 1929 it was decided that the kulaks were to be liquidated as a class.
And here is the pattern you need to notice.
It was not soldiers from Moscow who emptied the farms. It was the neighbours.
In every village committees of the poorest peasants were set up, and they went into the house of the man they had known their whole lives and divided his clothes, his furniture and his animals among themselves. And they got a share for their trouble. He was sent east with his family in a cattle wagon, and his farm went to the collective. Around two million people disappeared that way in two years.
The only thing it took for broad acceptance of this was a word.
As long as he was just Ivan from the farm by the stream, taking his things was theft. Once he became a "kulak", it became "justice". Same man, same cows, same neighbours. Only the word had moved, and with the word the line moved for what you were allowed to do to him. The famine that followed two years later is the story of what happens to a country where envy has been given a word and a permission.
That is what I recognise here. Not the scale - not yet anyways - but the mechanism.
Envy that is suppressed long enough does not disappear.
It renames itself.
It calls itself class struggle, anti-capitalism, solidarity with a people far away, and it can walk for decades under that name, right up until the right circumstances arise and there is no longer anyone to hold it back. Then it smashes the window itself, with its own hands, and walks in over the glass with the calm you only have when you are convinced you are entirely in your right.
It is not a moment of weakness. It is a conviction that is finally allowed to act. Then it drops the name and takes what it wanted all along.
And they took it with bloodshot eyes, worse than the worst Black Friday, which they are otherwise never slow to condemn when it is other people standing in the queue.
That is why I cannot take the ideologies seriously as ideas. I can only take them seriously as desire.
Thirty years of anti-capitalism boiled down to one Friday evening.
So they did want the bag after all. Just like the rest of us.
They just didn't want to pay for it. 🤓😉
❤️🔥🪽
Good Sunday evening and have a good week, friends.
I have finally managed to get Krisztina into a picture - so it is a bit prettier than the ones of me alone.
