[D66] Lost future

[A.O.]

(Pomerantsev gisteren in Tegenlicht: wij hebben de sociale categorieën
en de politieke ideologieën verloren. Het is veel erger dan dat: we
hebben de mogelijkheid om een radicaal andere toekomst te
conceptualiseren verloren. Wie achter de populisten aanrent heeft dit
nog niet begrepen. Baudet=Bedrog. VVD=Maffia.)

“a polis haunted not only by the past but by lost futures.”

Voor een algemene kiezersstaking.

+++

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Gr%C3%A8ve_des_%C3%A9lecteurs

La Grève des électeurs
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The Voters strike
Author	Octave Mirbeau
Original title	'La Grève des électeurs'
Country	France
Language	French
Genre	Pamphlet
Publisher	Les Temps nouveaux
Publication date
	1902

La Grève des electeurs (The Voters strike) is the title of a clearly
anarchist chronicle by French writer Octave Mirbeau, First appearing in
Le Figaro on November 28, 1888, the text was subsequently published on
numerous occasions in the form of a brochure, often associated with
another chronicle, « Prélude », that also appeared in Le Figaro on July
14, 1889. The first edition appeared in 1902, in issue 22 of an
anarchist newspaper, Les Temps nouveaux, and has since been translated
into over a dozen languages and widely disseminated by anarchist groups
throughout Europe.

Electoral trickery

Like all anarchists, Mirbeau regarded universal suffrage and the
electoral system as nothing more than a form of trickery by which the
powerful obtained at little cost the support of the very people they
oppressed and exploited. Mirbeau addresses an average voter, « a
thinking biped who was endowed with free will – or so he was told – and
who went away, proud of his rights, convinced he was doing his duty,
having dropped off some kind of a ballot in some kind of a ballot box ».
Mirbeau tasks himself with demystifying, discrediting, and
delegitimizing the so-called "right to vote" by which the oppressed,
alienated and made into idiots, "freely" choose those who exploit them :
« Sheep go to the slaughterhouse. They say nothing. They hope for
nothing. But at least they don’t vote for the butcher who will slaughter
them or the bourgeois who will eat them. Stupider than animals, more
sheep-like than sheep, the voter names his butcher and selects his
bourgeois. » And as Mirbeau adds with bitter irony: « He has undergone
revolutions to attain this right. »

Instead of assuming his freedom, the voter – this « unutterable imbecile
» – does nothing more than choose a master, one who dazzles him with
impossible promises and has not the least care for the interest of the
masses: in so doing, he acquiesces to his own servitude. Mirbeau
therefore calls on voters to boycott the ballot box, not to act blindly
as sheep, but to act lucidly as citizens.