Thursday, January 20, 2011

Berlusconi & Ben Ali: Good b(d)ye to all that!

Checking Out!


September 1936 was an interesting month. The movie Swing Time starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers with the song The Way You Look Tonight had just been released, Robert Capa published his infamous picture of the 'Falling Soldier' in the Spanish Civil war and Adolf Hitler was conducting a series of speeches to rouse the German ‘volk’.



Vu Magazine 23 September 1936

On the 12 September 1936 in a speech at Nuremburg, to the Labour Front, Hitler declared:

Nothing can make me change my own belief. I am convinced that the unworthiest among us is he who cannot master his ill fortune.

And so it came to pass that a new generation of self-believers were encouraged to see people as unworthy – and somehow undeserving – if fortune in terms of health, wealth, education, fate or influence eluded them.

Nine days earlier than Hitler's speech, on the 3 September 1936, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali the recently deposed dictator of Tunisia was born, and 17 days later, on the 29 September, it was to be the turn of Silvio Berlusconi.

Oh Silvio!
Frankly Angela, I don't give a damn!


Both men, apart from their obvious preoccupation with dying their hair in order to maintain a youthful illusion for their ‘unworthy’ subjects, developed an intense despotic self-belief. In Ben Ali's case this resulted in torture, exile and murder of any opposition. In Berlusconi's case a sordid descent into an orgy of deceit.


Waiting for Ben Ali

Ben Ali is thankfully gone, albeit with 1.5 tonnes of gold, to Saudi Arabia where Standard Oil announced the development of their Arabian Oil fields in September 1936 and Berlusconi will surely follow soon, with or without some brunette coloured company.

Good Dye to them.

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