Subversion Subverted

DURING the 1950s, a Parisian collective of radical artists and outsiders called the Letterist International would employ a clever propaganda technique known as détournement. The term itself, meaning 're-routing' or 'hijacking,' epitomised the group's tendency to appropriate capitalist slogans - particularly in advertising - and turn them against the System. Popular expressions were deliberately re-cast into semi-recognisable caricatures that subverted the status quo by using humour and satire to expose the true nature of capitalism itself. This tactic was later used by Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem and various other members of the Situationist International.

It recently occurred to me that this phenomenon can also manifest in a completely accidental or unintended fashion, with the modern purveyors of 'wokeism' so keen to ram their puritanical views down our throats that they have angered and alienated ordinary people. Whilst the homosexual, transsexual and pro-paedophilia lobbies probably imagine they can subvert reality in a similar way to that of the Letterist International, they have actually reinforced the capitalist agenda.

With an increasing number of Far Right politicians now being accepted into the mainstream, it seems fair to suggest that the great sexual pretenders were being used to provoke a totalitarian backlash. The worrying effects of twenty-first century détournement, also known as guerrilla theatre or culture jamming, have therefore led to a form of Situationism-in-reverse. Just as the Frankfurt School had clandestinely tempered Marxism in accordance with capitalist principles, so too are members of the unsuspecting 'woke' movement being used to usher in a new age of political, social and economic repression. The iron fist of capitalist renewal will not be placed in the hands of the Left, as many had assumed, but in the hands of the Right.