Friday, September 23, 2011

War and shopping - an extremism that never speaks its name

Click here to access article by John Pilger from his website. 

While looking for a bookshop that was no longer there, this perceptive Australian journalist inadvertently enters into the artificial capitalist world of a shopping mall and sees so much of the extremism that illustrates characteristics of the larger capitalist world of wealth and poverty. 
The mega mall, the biggest in Europe, is built in the midst of grey tower blocks not far from where the recent riots occurred, its “designer” products, made mostly with cheap, regimented labour, beckon the indebted. That it stands on a site where London workers made trains – thousands of locomotives, carriages and goods wagons – in what was once called manufacturing is of melancholy interest. The mega mall’s jobs produce nothing and are mostly low-paid. It is an emblem of extreme times.
I don't see that the article has much to do with wars as the title suggests, unless he is thinking in the context of class wars.