<nettime> France Against the Robots (Jean-Marie Straub)

[sebastian@rolux.org]

France Against the Robots

The word "revolution" to us Frenchmen is not a vague term. We know that
Revolution is a rupture, that Revolution is an Absolute. There is no such thing
as a moderate revolution, there is no such thing as a planned revolution - as
one speaks of a planned economy. The revolution we are announcing will overturn
the entire existing order or it will not take place at all. If we believe that
the present system is capable of being reformed, that it can, in itself, check
the fatal course of its evolution towards Dictatorship - the dictatorship of
money, of race, of class, of the Nation - we will certainly refuse to run the
risk of an explosion capable of destroying precious things that can only be
rebuilt with much time, perseverance, selflessness, and love. But the present
system will not change the course of its evolution for the good reason that it
is no longer evolving; it is merely reorganizing itself with the view of
lasting a little longer, of surviving. Far from professing to resolve its own
contradictions, which are, in any case, impossible to resolve, it seems more
and more inclined to impose them by force through strict regulation of
individual effort that grows more rigid and more particular every day, carried
out in the name of a sort of State Socialism, which is the democratic form of
Dictatorship. Every day, in fact, brings us another proof that the purely
ideological era has long since passed, in New York as well as in Moscow and
London. We can see the Imperial English Democracy, the Plutocratic American
Democracy and the Marxist Empire of Soviet Dominions walking, if not hand in
hand—far from it! - at least pursuing the same goal, that is to say maintaining
at all costs and even while appearing to oppose it, the system in which they
have acquired wealth and power. For, in the end, Russia has profited no less
from the capitalist system than America and England; it has played the role of
the Member of Parliament who makes a fortune in Opposition. In short: regimes
formerly opposed in ideology are now directly united by Technology. A world
dominated by Technology is lost for Liberty.

from: La France contre les Robots (Jean-Marie Straub, 2020)
from: La France contre les Robots (Georges Bernanos, 1945)

via: https://kinoslang.blogspot.com/
via: https://piratecinema.org/screenings/20200405



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